1996 Called; They Want Their Webdesign Back
In preparation for adding a tagcloud, I've started revising the layout of my blog. The goals are as stated before: to be standards compliant, readable, minimal, and to provide control to the user.
Progress can be seen here, complete with
ugly background colors for debugging. This iteration will include styles
for embedded code fragments, and markup for photos, along with a
fixed-fluid
two-column layout.
Comment welcome...
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Death of Design
At the time I'm writing this, the design of my site is minimal. I've deliberately chosen xhtml 1.0 strict as the markup for my pages, and there are currently exactly four lines of css, the purpose of which is to present the tags for each entry on a single line. In markup, they are noted as an unordered list, which, semantically, tags are.
Philosophically, my approach is to minimize the use of styles, relying on them only to make the page more readable, while maximizing use of semantically significant markup, such as an on ordered list of tags, instead of whitespace-separated, inline links. It's kind of like CSS Naked Day, but it's everyday.
This gives control back to the user where it should be, but also requires participation and a degree of savvy that users may not be used to. Users are given responsibility for using—users using, hmmm—their browsers to find a font size they find comfortable, for example. To a greater extent, users must take responsibility for their own experience.
It's similarly liberating for me as generator of the content. I'm not a graphic artist, and I'm certainly not interested it tweaking and retweaking the layout to make it work with ahem other browsers. I want to be reasonably confident that I've made the information available in the most convenient and easy to digest form, and then not worry about it. I have a gut feeling that if ease of use is accomplished, beauty of presentation will be a co-effect.
Unfortunately, we have been trained by corporate marketing experts to
expect data to be presented in a highly controlled and prepackaged
fashion. Content that is not presented in three non-resizable columns is
likely to be written off as unprofessional
or unreliable
.
We have been trained that real information is branded.
I've received mixed reviews so far, ranging from very clean
to
unpolished
to it renders so fast
to 1996 called; they
want their layout back
. I'll keep adjusting as
old features are reapplied and new features are added, but I don't
expect it will change much.
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