Things that have dropped on my head
After being asleep for 5 hours or so I couldn’t sleep anymore and woke up at 4:00 AM. That’s a good time to review the good ol’ rss feeds and found that there had been a few very interesting, although not related, articles on web development, technique and the future of web design.
First, Steven Clark wrote an excellent article on The Three Pillars of Good Web Design, and I couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. A web site is not a poster, or a magazine, it has its own needs and uses and we can’t forget about it.
Second, Eric Meyer went and created what looks like very complicated css that surely implied many hours of testing at retesting but ultimately achieves a very straightforward, standards compliant and very cool Structured Timeline purely using html and css. I love it!!!
And, finally, on A List Apart, Aaron Gustafson reveals a complement that would take us Beyond the Doctype Switch to see if that will stop new browser releases from breaking the code of lazy ass developers who still use Frontpage 98 to make their sites. Personally, I couldn’t care less if some developer harebrainedly makes a site without consideration for standards or proper design and it then breaks on IE 8 or whatever comes later. That should teach them or their clients (you know who, the ones that insisted that it had to work ‘just so’ on IE5.5 and to hell with everything else). Still, we’ll have to see if there are any advantages in using a new switch or if it will add a new layer of complexity and uncertainty to the mix.
I’m still undecided but I think that harebrained designers will keep breaking the web. That’s right, it’s not new browser versions but bad web designers who break the web. There, I said it.