jtnt://life/unedited

And I quote - "downloading will not work with Internet Explorer"

Went to download the latest update to Roxio's Toast CD burning application, and was surpisingly greeted by this message:

In order to download the update you will need Safari, Camino or Netscape browser – downloading will not work with Internet Explorer.

This is really no better than the silly coders who disallow any other browser, it's just that you don't often see the apple fall on IE's side of the tree.

Evolt likes me! They really like me!

Or, rather, they like my recent search engine optimization paper, just published on the venerable site.

Evolt, in case you didn't know, is a "world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences."

Read up, and hook me with any comments, corrections, or suggestions you have. Try not to make too much fun of my picture.

p.s. Yes, this is the same as this SEO whitepaper, just on a different site and in HTML instead of PDF.

Baby Got Back, or Usability Ain't All About The Front-end

Which is more ridiculous?

Posting a URL in a web community forum with automatic URL-to-link functionality without including the "http://" (?), or the fact that no forum software recognizes a URL without the http:// with its URL-to-link feature?

Yes, the latter. I agree. No forum software I know even gives you the option.

Fill in obvious rant about not placing the burden on the site visitor and putting the site to work for the site visitor here.

Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines

The Department of Health and Human Services has authored a massive paper entitled, Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines. The title pretty much tells the story.

This paper is nothing if not well-documented, researched, and plain old big in scope. 17 chapters, 128 pages, full of screen shots, and a handly little rating guide to help you quickly determine the relevance and strength of evidence of a particular issue. Usability out of a usability handbook. Fancy that.

Not only that, they've gone one step further and provided us with a web-based sorting tool for this rating system. They smartly realized that users/readers of such a cumbersome tome need many different ways to access and retrieve the information therein.

While you're there, check out the Usability University for upcoming classes and seminars on a variety of usability and accessibility-related topics.

Design By Levitra

Mr. Herasimchuk has redesigned his Design By Fire site, but it still looks like his inspiration came from the Levitra logo. Wink wink.

All joking aside, this redesign is a step backwards from its predecessor. Where am I on this site? Why is everything pushed down so far? Even the logo at the top is a good 150 pixels from the top, but more important all of the navigation is entirely below the fold on my little Pismo Powerbook. It also gives me dreaded horizontal scroll bars. Icky.

Web designers used to get panned for trying to design the web like print. Now, "top" designers are being praised for taking this tack. Andrei himself calls this out as a goal of the redesign, "One of my goals with this redesign was to break away from looking too much like a blog, and more like a dynamic printed publication."

This is possibly a good goal in part, as the majority of print design is much more readable than most web design. However, this redesign misses the mark. If I picked up a print publication that was this hard to "navigate," well, I'd put it down.

I think the Design By Fire redesign should be praised for attempting to forge a new path, but unfortunately the path it forges is going to get all its followers lost in the woods.

Side note: Allow me to point out the huge headlines he uses.

Whitepaper: Practical Search Engine Optimization

My first attempt at distilling my thoughts on search engine optimization into an easily understood collection of words and phrases has been published and posted to the Erickson Barnett site.

Practical Search Engine Optimization: What works. What doesn't. Strategies and myths.

Enjoy.

Will the next version of Internet Explorer spell the end for pop-up windows?

The next version of Internet Explorer, Service Pack 2 (SP2), will contain a pop-up blocker which is on by default.

Now that the browser that over 90% of the world uses will kill pop-ups (finally) out of the box, will advertisers (and porn purveyors) stop using them?

We can only hope.

Update: musicplasma: the music visual search engine.

Tip: Use the two inner-most areas of the concentric circles that define your selection point to zoom in and out. This took me a while to discover, but it's a gem of a find.

Wish #1: I should be able to minimize/hide the search/info remote control interface thing-a-ma-bob with a single click.

Wish #2: There should be single-click "show all" functionality as well.

Props: I get more impressed with this site the longer I play with it. This is in no small part because I get to play with the site itself.

musicplasma: the music visual search engine.

Musicplasma

Type in an artist or band name in the search box. See and interact with related artists.

I wonder, are they simply hooking into Amazon.com's recommendations?

No matter. This is cool. Way cool.

Can I get a...?

The Weekly Standards is featuring a site designed and built by my firm, Erickson Barnett, this week.

Woot! Thanks, Adam.

HTML Pig Latin

I do not understand the benefits offered by so-called "text-to-html" converters (?), ala Markdown or Textile.

For the unfamiliar, the above-mentioned are tools which translate alternate text codes into HTML code. For example, if I typed *hello world* into Textile, it would translate that into <em>hello world</em>.

You're thinking, "This is nothing more than a markup language for HTML. And HTML is already a markup language."

You are wise.

Just when I had run out of things to learn, here comes this gem.

How is typing "An [example](http://url.com/ "Title")" any easier or faster than typing "<An <a href="http://url.com/" Title="Title">example>/a>"?

It's not. Even though the normal HTML version contains more characters to type, you can fly through it because it's a language you already know.

If you're like me, typing out basic HTML for links, images, tables, etc. flows as easily as iced-tea in the summer. The last thing I need is some other language to cloud my mind and step in as a middleman between what my fingers have to type (this new language) and what my brain is thinking (my beloved HTML).

Frankly, even if you were first starting to learn HTML (or a healthy HTML alternative), it's simply easier to learn and make sense out of HTML than these cryptic simplifications. If I told you that one asterisk equals italics and two asterisks means bold, how often do you think you'd forget that or get the two confused?

It's not just because you're getting older and more senile that you'd forget these, it's because they are completely random and contain no internal meaning.

How self-explanatory would it be for you to "View Source", see an asterisk, and determine that it means italics?

Quick, tell me what this code does:

**hello world**

See what I mean? And I just told you what the silly code does at the beginning of this post! (?)

For the same reasons pig latin is harder to speak or write than regular English.

I must be missing something. I know, having read both of their sites for months, that the developers behind both of the products slandered in this post are intelligent to a high degree. Not only that, I respect them.

So it baffles me to think that these venerable men have spent countless hours pouring over software that is so utterly useless and devising clever alternate languages for HTML.

These tools are like a hokey, web-based Pig Latin Translator forwarded to you by an annoying co-worker, but without the fun and goofy allure of the real thing.

This headline is not all that big.

Mark my words: the next fad in web design* will be huge (and I mean really big huge) headline text.

It started with Zeldman's redesign and continues on a new, bold (pun intended) level with the Coudal Partners redesign.

Who's next?

* The previous fad, still prevalent today, is the re-emergence of a huge picture with little apparent relevance to the site. (Gee, that's so artsy! I love artsy.) Coudal gets bonus points for clinging to this fad while at the same time furthering a new one.

Erickson Barnett Design Monkeys

Do you love sea monkeys?! Of course you do. Who doesn't? Those little, mysterious pets we all remember from the back of comic books are just too, well, mysterious and little not to love! Plus, they make reference to them in Dazed and Confused, so they're a bona-fide pop culture hit in a cultish kind of way. (It's hip to like sea monkeys, and you're not un-hip, are you?)

Well, the thing you never thought could happen has happened. Through the miracles of modern science and active use of one's imagination, Erickson Barnett, a marketing and creative agency, has developed a human-sized mutant version of the sea monkey called the Design Monkey.

We have seen these Design Monkeys roaming the halls and producing work for clients already, so they are alive and fast becoming productive members of our Erickson Barnett society. I can't wait to see what they'll do next!

This is not simple and it sure ain't graceful.

Battling atrophied creative muscles to put into pixels a new design idea for this site. Conspicuously drawn to the grace of simplicity and the captivating nature of top-notch content.

Via k10k.net, but it doesn't suck

This site is beautiful, and even though I found it via k10k.net, it does not contain any of the following:

• Text so small that it would be hard to read even if it wasn't put on a non-contrasting background.
• Iframes, iframes, iframes!
• Pixel art.
• A freakish attachment to the use of pixelated fonts.
• Unintuitive navigation icons.

Disclaimer: Yes, k10k contains all of these. Yes, I think k10k sucks. Big time. (There, I said it. Whew!) And yes, I know Scrivs has told us not to bust on the designs of web sites (only the content is open for opinion, apparently) in public.

k10k just deserves it too much. I've seen way too many people gush over and link to (but only to the home page) the unusable, unreadable, unbookmarkable, cacophony of iframes that somehow has been passed off to the world as the pinnacle of web design. Honestly, k10k is a case study waiting to happen.

I'm not maintaining that the designers behind k10k are talentless. Certainly, they have more design skills than this techie. Please don't think I am maintaining I have more skillz than they. I'm sure their billz are much better paid than mine.

They just didn't really turn it on for their own site. In fact, I think they must have designed the site during lent, having given up sound judgment. Moreover, they undoubtedly have an eye for great design. How else would I have been blessed with the five minutes I spent at the Arne Maynard Garden site?

---

Update: Sorry, Paul. I didn't mean to add to your frustration on the issue of critiques of web design. Indeed, I liked and agreed with what you had to say, and admittedly took your words out of context to make an exciting link. :-) I, too, blame my lack of communication skills and the impossibilities of getting sarcasm across in writing. These blogs can be dangerous things in the hands of us amateurs, huh?

Erickson Barnett Publications

I am testing out a new way of linking to pop-ups and how this affects getting these popped-up pages listed/indexed in Google. The test page is the Erickson Barnett Publications page. We'll see what happens.

Just the facts for the folks at Six Apart

Q: How do you use MT 3?

A: One blog. One author. Completely personal. The free version suits me just fine. Thank you.

Erickson Barnett hires new Art Director, Dave Kammerdeiner

The marketing agency who generously hired me almost six years ago, Erickson Barnett, recently hired a new Art Director, Dave Kammerdeiner, to head up our creative department.

I can't wait to see what the creative team pumps out with this new burst of talent.

Blogger.com gets CSS-ified

Figured it would be on-topic to post that blogger.com has gone the way of standards and pure CSS - and with the help of Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path no less.

The look is great (although I can't dig on the physics-challenging double drop shadows either, Kottke). The code is clean (but formatted horribly). And the page even has a "big banana" ala Seth Godin (sort of).

Nice work, despite the parentheses.

Domain name speculation.

• meosphere.com
• uneditedlife.com

The links don't work now, but they might someday. And we all know how important PageRank is.

Philosophies masquerading as solutions

A quote in a recent interview Eric Meyer (CSS guru in the truest sense of the word) is so prescient and taut it applies to virtually anything. I think it bears repeating:

Any time a person tells you that there is one and only one way to size fonts for all sites, they're trying to hand you a philosophy, not a solution.

This reminds me of a quote from the movie The Big Kahuna:

...As soon as you lay your hands on a conversation to steer it, it's not a conversation anymore; it's a pitch. And you're not a human being; you're a marketing rep.

I've found the Anti-Site

I was going to write about my Web Site Pet Peeves of the Week, but then I found one site which encapsulates them all:

• Individual java applets for navigation.
• Invisible frames to keep the URL in the location bar nice and neat, making bookmarking pages impossible. (I'd be linking to each of these examples if it wasn't for this "feature.")
• Said navigation disappears on second-level pages. (Hell, is you must use frames at least put that fancy java navigation in one.)
• Under construction pages. (Just don't link to the damn page.)*
• Bad, useless animation which consists only of buzzwords flying around purposelessly.
• No contact information. Anywhere. (Boy, your business must have gone through the roof after this site went live!.)

The one web site atrocity this site doesn't commit is putting a midi sound effect which automatically plays when the page loads.** (Bonus points if you don't give the user a way to turn the sound off.)

* Actually, the link to the under construction page is not visible, yet its spot in the navigation (lower-left) is still linked. Nice touch. This is so bad I had never even thought of it.

** This site does actually contain sound which plays automatically, however, if you found the example of the cheesy animation, you also by default found the annoying music you no doubt tried but couldn't turn off. Technically, it's also on a completely different site (with its own set of bad java navigation), however there's no advance notice or indication in the slightest that you are being taken to a new site. And of course, the URL in the location bar is of no help here either.

Clear!

I don't get "Clear" or "Rest Form" buttons on the average web form.

When have you ever gotten finished filling in all the necessary fields on a form and said to yourself, "Shit. I just entered completely incorrect information into that form. I need to wipe everything and start over."?

And the information one is usually entering into a form is one's contact information. How often does one mess this up? Entirely and to the point that the easiest way of fixing the problem is to do it again from scratch?

Do you expect that even once someone has not only entered in completely unsuitable (or even specious) information but only realized this at the very end of the process? How often do you type information into a form without regard to it's accuracy and only check it for errors when you are finished? This just isn't they way it's done.

More often these buttons are probably only ever clicked accidentally with an errant click or because the user blindly thinks it is the submit button.

May favorite occurences of these exhaustively dysfunctionally-used buttons is when I see them with one-item forms, such as an enewsletter sign-up form which only requests one's email address. If I were to make a mistake, pressing a separate button to clear my entry would actually be made harder (in a relative sense, of course) by way of adding a click to the process. This extra click with my mouse would also require me to take my hands off my keyboard - where they had to have been for me to provide the proper information.

It's just not happening, people. There is no need to reset a form right before one would likely be going to there submit the form.

Now, I'm not just one to bitch and moan about something without offering a solution. If you don't want to waste the brain cells that are holding the <HTML code> for a clear button, how about pre-filling all your form fields with sample data for the user to peruse and putting that button at the top of the form?

Now that's a clear button I could love!

Disclaimer: I am referring to only the average web form in this tirade. I have seen excellent uses of clear buttons on forms in web applications and their ilk.

Insipid, generic electronica.

Some of the coolest sites on the web are developed entirely in Flash. This is great and fine. What bothers me is that a great many of these sites also choose to play music for you, since Flash gives them the ability to do this very easily. I have serious problems with this.

Many of these sites are uber-hip sites that cater to the digitally hip. I'd venture a guess that visitors of these sites - at least their core audience - have picked up an iPod or some digital music player, or use iTunes, or at the very least are playing music while surfing via some device, connected to their computer or not. Hep cats listen to music a lot, we all know that.

So these sites, when I load them and their insipid, generic electronica (it is invariably insipid, generic electronica these sites think is cool), are seriously hurting my viewing experience by forcing their choice of insipid, generic electronica upon me.

What's worse is when I am listening to some song in iTunes, really rocking out with the volume turned up, I am blown out of my chair by their low-fi insipid, generic electronica competing with my personally-chosen musical selection.

Why then do these sites feel it necessary to give us music with their sites? These are not sites for bands, mind you. These are sites for web design shops, high-end hosting, super-cool blog-types, etc. That is, sites that have nothing to do with music or audio of any sort. I've missed the connection, if there is one, as to why music is pertinent to these sites.

So, I say to all Flash developers, resist the urge to throw in that hackneyed yet ubiquitous music player with fake EQ feedback animation into your sites. It's old, impertinent, and most importantly rude to your users. And if you must make me listen to your music while on your site, consider yourself original by not using some insipid, generic electronica as your musical selection.

Thank you. Drive-through.

Oh, Zeldman. What are you thinking?

Let me preface this by saying that I am, generally, a fan of Zeldman. I love his book, and he has done much to make the world of the wide web better for web users (and developers, especially) now and in the future.

Also, let me say that I also know that my site sucks, and the navigation is among the worst of its problems. So, I also know bad design when I see it, even when I'm the designer.

So, all that said, Zeldman has finally lost it. Today he spends 350 words discussing the revamping of his so-called "Essentials" page. This is a page that contains select entries in his heretofore venerable weblog that are particularly useful, popular, or possibly ones that he just likes the best. He then points out that his chosen and lone access point to this page is a small "contextual" (Contextual? Really? Hardly.) text link at the bottom of the home page.

Let me see. Where do I begin?

He justifies not putting a new item in the main navigation for this page with "one more nav button would be one too many, and clutter does not promote clarity." Agreed. However, does hiding what I would argue to be one of the more useful links on the entire site at the bottom of a sometimes very lengthy page promote clarity - or usability - or good sense in the slightest?

He continues. "Some links demand to live in primary navigation." Like the one entitled "glam" that brings the user to his inexplicable ramblings? I, like most others, I would imagine, read zeldman.com to be wowed by great examples of design with web standards, to hear the latest news and happenings in the world of forward-thinking web design, and other related topics. How many people are "demanding" to read your idea of a good short story, Jeffrey? Check your stats. Tell me.

At the very least, a link to these "essentials" should be in his secondary navigation. However, this doesn't make as much sense as putting it the main navigation, I would argue. To me this page certainly is more related to the overall subject matter of the site than the other links in the main navigation.

Speaking of which, the other two links in the main navigation — one a link to a promo page for his book, the other a link to archived web projects, the most recent one from the year 2000! — hardly "demand" to be included in the main navigation more than a link to "entries a few readers may value" — the Essentials page.

Where's the logic? Where's the user-focused design? Where has our Zeldman gone?!

I think you get my point. I am annoyed by what I see as an egregious oversight in site useability. Why would a designer confine access to the most valuable and useful posts on a weblog (if that's what his site is) in a text link placed on a portion of a page a very small fraction of people are likely to find and an even smaller portion are likely to click on even if they do find it?

If this link is so unimportant as to not warrant a place in any navigation, why, pray tell, is it important enough to warrant an entire post? I guess without this post, no one would even know the link is even there, so at least the post about the link is useful even if the actual link itself is not.

The Paris Hilton Sex Tape Phenomenon

I've got to come up with a name for the phenomenon of things completely unrelated to the web blogging world at large being spontaneously picked up by the world of A-List bloggers.

The latest example of this is the Paris Hilton Sex Tape craze. I present Exhbits A-C:

• Kottke
• Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent
• Paul Katcher

As is discussed in Exhibit C, the motivation to post about such a hot topic can easily be explained by the desire to rise push up their GoogleRank (an interesting double entendre, if you ask me).

But this does not explain such highrollers as Kottke and Hammersley getting in the fray. Their blogs are usually very focused, finely tuned web musings. Moreover, they have little need to resort to such measures to increase their page views. Their web hosting bandwidth bills are already high enough each month, I'm sure.

This particluar topic aside (since it's so obvious), what makes a given topic blow up on such popular blogs? And on this particular topic (since it's so trashy), what makes a topic that would usually be hidden in the back of the sock drawer of most web sites suitable for posting on normally PG-13 blogs?

Let's Get Small

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that I assume the rest of the uber-hip (see, I used "uber" so I must be cool) web design world will find objectionable: I hate pixel fonts.

To be clear, I hate their usage. Of themselves, some of these fonts are cool. Like these. But the de rigeur (again, cool-proof) usage is to use them at such miniscule proportions that they are essentially useless. What's more, they are commonly used in sites as headers for content sections, navigation, etc. Arguably, the areas where readability counts most.

Indeed, the use of pixel fonts at lilliputian sizes is not just accepted and cool, but seemingly required. Wherever you see them used, you can barely see them used!

How did the use of these, and especially at such tiny proportions, become so universally smiled upon? The ultimate good bad example is the very popular k10k.net site. Can anyone read the headings on all the little content boxes on this site? And the navigation?

What gets me is that these fonts are lauded even by the same web designers at the fore of useability and so-called forward-thinking design? How can this be?

Yes, these fonts are much sharper at small pixel sizes than other fonts, but does this mean that you are required to use them at sub-atomic sizes? I can turn off anti-aliasing and make Arial Black somewhat more legible at 8 pixels and the whole design world would run screaming for the hills. That is, if they were listening in the first place. Why then is it acceptable to use these pixel fonts at such small sizes?

I'm not fond of posting questions without answers, but the unfortunate circumstance I find myself in forces me to do this. I am obviously on the out on this subject. If a site so popular and regarded as an example of good design on the web such as k10k uses them, and a man so highly worshipped as Zeldman pushes them, I must be missing something. Right?

So, would both of the people that read this site kindly offer their points of view on this and show me the light?

Links to ALA and Zeldman.com are redundant.

I could post something about one of the latest articles on Zeldman's site, A List Apart, on how content is king on the web. But if you're into this sort of stuff, I can't imagine you haven't been to Zeldman.com and the ALA site already this week.

Both are on my daily visit list, although updates have been less frequent as of late, but are picking up. They should be on yours, too.

CSS on parade

The marketing agency for which I work just launched its new site today. It's written in standards-compliant XHTML and CSS (and it validates as XHTML 1.0 strict!) and is chock-full of the latest CSS tricks and gadgets. The XHTML code for each page is alarmingly light, and serves as a shining example of how clean web site code can be when CSS is used for layout.

Big ups go to my main man, Marty, who did most of the heavy lifting on the development side. Excellent work, and just in time for your 3-month review!

One step above a "Skip Intro" Flash splash screen

I went to to mazda.com to research the advantages of their rotary engine after the subject was brought up in conversation at work yesterday.

I am a car freak, so I know that one of the first things I am likely to have to do when visiting a major car corporation's site is to pick what area of the globe I reside. The Mazda site is no different in this respect. The home page comes up and greets the user with the ubiquitous "Loading..." animation, which usually signals that a super-neato Flash movie is about to come on. I am not overly excited.

After waiting about five seconds the word "Complete" flashes on the screen, and the opening animation flows to present me with a map of the world with the names of the major areas in which Mazda is represented written across the top. My annoyance at this point is two-fold.

I am immediately peeved that I just waited at least ten seconds (once the "Loading..." and "Complete" messages have gone and the intro animation has actually presented me with clickable options) for a Flash movie whose sole purpose is to let me choose my geographical region. I shudder to think how much money Mazda shelled out in order to waste my time like this.

One need only look at BMW or Mercedes Benz to see the right way to send a user to their local site. These companies' sites, like the cars the they make, are focused on thier users, while still maintaining a very high-end, graceful interface. Mazda should take their lead on both accounts.

My second gripe with Mazda's useless Flash geo-picker is that I cannot click on my region in the map. Rolling my mouse over or clicking the images of the countries doesn't do a thing. I must mouseover the text at the top of the movie, and then click my region. They spend all this money and time (including mine!) on this whizz-bang Flash movie, and they don't even use the naturally occurring navigational metaphor sitting right in front of them. One can only guess that their design firm told them this was "out of scope."

And to top it all off, their snazzy Mazda 6 doesn't even come with a 6-speed transmission. I tell you, these guys really have a knack for missing the obvious.

More Launch.not

Marty has picked up the ball on the Launch.not browser-detection ugliness and confirmed that the Launch.not video does indeed play on IE 6 on Windows. Shocker.

Following up on this test and doing my own due diligence, I present the following.

IE 5.2

Camino 0.7.0

Omniweb 4.5

Opera 6.02

Success? No. the video never showed. Moreover, when I refreshed the page, I was greeted with the ever-popular:

In the interest of completeness, I decided to run a BrowserCam job to see what the Windows and Linux browsers were up to. Not much, it seems.

I ran and re-run the job a few times and got the same result each time. I have to assume that the video would have played on those displaying "Load a plug-in you don't have" dialog boxes.

I have to hand it to Yahoo, the parent of Launch. Their Launch.com System Requirements page tells the truth on what to expect from Macintosh browsers.

Still, it seems that the core application that runs the video is Windows Media Player. This is all one should really need, if only one was given the opportunity to download a streaming file with an external app — like everybody else does it! If they don't, they should.

Launch.com won't.

Surfing around while trying to find something else to look at besides hurricane Isabel coverage, I came upon a link to view a new Dave Matthews video on Launch.com. I click said link, get get this:

Now, there are all kinds of things that are striking about this "ERROR!" message. As you can see from my browser interface, I am using Safari, not any flavor of Netscape. But let's excuse this, since Safari does identify itself with as a Gecko browser.

The beauty is that I get this error even when I set Safari to report that I am using MSIE version 6. Now, I can't test this right now, but I am certain that if I was using the most popular (by default) browser in the world, this video would launch properly. There's no way Launch.com could survive if IE 6 users couldn't see their stuff.

I have no real conclusion here. This is just another fine example of bad web development or design or whatever bucket you want to put this into. It's just bad, ok? It's a simple example of yet another awful browser-detection script gone awry.

Why do I need Launch.com to protect me from myself. Can't I at least try to get it to work? At the very least, a link to continue regardless of the error should have been included.

Silly Launch.com, browser detection tricks are for kids.

Update: The reason switching the User Agent Safari reports doesn't work is because the link pops up a new window, which defaults to reporting itself as Safari again.

This doesn't excuse the behavior of this site. Just offers a bit more explanation.

Lord Martimus: Dark Master of the Evil Kingdom of CSS Dropdown Menus

I would be remiss if I didn't make mention of the site of one my co-workers, Marty, who's definitely fighting the good fight on the CSS "DHTML" dropdown menu battlefield.

The bitch (see, these things make me curse. They're surely evil!) of it all is that he has worked tirelessly for the better part of a week trying, laboring even, to get these damn (There I go again.) leeches on the peckers (oh my!) of all web developers to work consistently (as much is possible) across all major browsers and platforms. Macintosh users have at least nine browsers to choose from. Granted, we don't test in all of them, but it gives you an idea of the magnitude of the task.

And to say that Mr. Marty has spent a lot of time wrestling with these pocks on the faces of all web sites is not to diminish the man's talent. He's not just a smart guy; he's pure heart. Without that, these zits on the noses of all web users would have beat him down long ago.

So, props to you, Marty. Death to you, dropdown menus. (I can't come up with another silly metaphor. Sorry.)

Dropdown menus are evil. I have proof.

Myself and the other two developers where I work are hot on the issue of ridding all future sites that we develop of those dropdown menus used to "enhance" a website's navigation which seem to be de rigeur since about a year or so ago. Even when they are done with nice and purty pure CSS, they are still the clunky, startling things they always have been.

The HierMenu sample page linked to above shows one of our (and others') gripes with dropdown menus. Looking at the two menus demoed, one has no idea what the menu is going to do. Even I moused over the top example and thought it was broken until I thought to click on it. And I physically recoiled when the menu popped down.

Here are some links to resources that back up our claims that dropdowns are the devil:

IBM DeveloperWorks: "...menus that pop up automatically when the user positions the cursor over a particular item onscreen. Whatever you call them, these things can be so difficult to use that they border on evil."

User Interface Engineering: "Users Decide First; Move Second"

Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir speak out. "In fact, many users are startled when they hover over an area of the screen and a new element pops up unexpectedly."

Shorewalker.com: "Once you realise the dangers of flying menus, you have to confront the truly difficult issue of Web site navigation."

Cascading vs Indexed Menu Design: "...Participants selected the Index as their first preference..."

Two new to me.

Found out today about b2, a blog tool, that looks to be pretty cool. (The image on their site certainly is.) Supposedly this thingy offers easier customization than MoveableType. Maybe I'll try it out with whatever new design happens.

A post at YayHooray led me to, PositionIsEverything, a site with much good CSS info on it. It always surprises me when I find a new one, after all the looking around I've done. It is especially fortunate when the new ones I find are so helpful and well done as this one.

Enjoy.

Update: "Plagiarizing" code

I've come to a resolution on this whole issue of "plagiarizing" code. (I really shouldn't even think of it that way, frankly. It's just a nice, sensationalistic way of referring to it.)

First, a brief update. Brandy, being very generous by giving her limited time to a complete stranger, promptly got back to me on this issue after trying to investigate who actually wrote the dropdown menu code at Sapient. She couldn't find out who actually wrote the code, but offered this bit of sage advice:

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"I would just use it and if anyone gives you a problem then find another solution. You could even give proprs in your .js file, that's a really good way to be ehtically correct. You arn't hiding that you snagged it and your happy to say that you did cause you think it's a well written peice of code. I can't see how that could bring any harm."

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Exactly. This was pretty much where I was sitting (near the fence) on the issue, but my uber-ethical side had to get a second opinion. And this was also the gist of what Rob was saying in the legal speak I quoted in my first post on this.

So, I plan on customizing the code for my purposes on a future project, but the original project for which I was investigating this for wound up continuing on with the old (IMO, hideous looking and dirty code-wise), non-validating code. A few options were explored before making this decision.

Taking the dropdown menus out completely — even though we all agreed that they were not necessary to the usability of the site — was impossible, simply because of the red tape we'd have to go through with the higher ups to make a change like this.

We could have also used a different DOCTYPE, but that would have thrown the X/HTML compliance requirement out the window. No can do.

So, the decision was made with the client and the CMS developers that we would take the DOCTYPE out completely. Again, not my first choice, but it was mostly out of my hands. As long as the code would validate "conditionally" by force-feeding an X/HTML DOCTYPE to the W3C validator, all the CMS-driven requirements would be met - as stipulated in the contract. It just meant that we would have to make sure to test religiously, to make sure that sending certain browsers into quirks mode didn't screw anything up.

Which brings us to the end of our story for now. The site got delivered a couple weeks ago, and after CMS integration and much content entry (thankfully not performed by me or anyone at my firm) was launched on Monday.

I still can't wait to get an opportunity to put these menus into a site at some point, though. Everytime I go to the Cingular site I spend 10-15 seconds rolling over the navigation just to see how smooth it is. Heck, the only reason I go to the site at is to marvel at the menus! Nice work Brandy and team.

No Meetup This Month

The webstandards.meetup.com meetup has been cancelled, since less than 5 people confirmed that they'd go. I'm guilty - I never confirmed myself. Excuses, excuses, I know - but I was just too busy.

webstandards.meetup.com

Ok, so there is a Web Standards meetup.com group - of course. I've listed myself as a host in DC. Anyone else out there? Let's get it on!

Phish.com Redesign

Version 3 of Phish.com was released recently. Done in tidy and valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS. What is cool is that though I am an avid follower of Phish and their music/culture, I found out about this from zeldman.com, a site I visit daily to discover the latest in web development news. The mixing of my passions is cool to me.

Are there people out there as passionate about both Phish and web technology as I am? I want to find you. Are you in the DC Metro area? That would be even cooler.

I was talking today with Tony of simiandesign.com - a new acquaintance via a job opening at my company (BTW, Tony is smart, passionate, experienced, and unemployed. Your company should hire him.) - about the fact that web developers in the DC Metro area are a very fragmented group. We don't get together. We don't fraternize. We do our work in isolation for our particular companies. There is no networking. Not even a meetup.com interest group. There should be. Maybe there will be soon...

I work in a small company. There is only one other developer. We have 4 designers, but they are pure graphic designers, with little interest in web technology let alone things like the web standards movement or the like.

I need to find others like me. I need to get together with other developers face to face (email groups just don't do it for me). I need to see what others are doing, explore experiemental technologies, learn about new stuff - and do so with others. There have got to be others in DC that share this desire.

Is there anybody out there?

Ethics - "Plagiarizing" code

I am building a site which must validate as XHTML compliant. This site also uses dropdown menus for navigation. The code I had been using for dropdown menus does not work when using a proper XHTML DOCTYPE - the menus appear in the top left of the browser window. (Take the DOCTYPE out altogether or put in an HTML 3.2 one, and they work perfectly.)

After much research, testing, and experiementing the only code that I found to both work for my purposes and also validate was code written for the cingular.com site.

I altered the design of these menus, but the basic underlying functionality was straight from the Cingular site. Being a scrupulous and generally ethical person, I decided that I needed to investigate whether I could use this code from a legal standpoint. So, I wrote the team leader of the cingular.com develpment team, one Brandy Fortune - the media diva herself - and asked her to investigate what it would take to get permission to use these menus.

She responded that she thought that since, a) there was no copyright statement in the code, b) the code is pretty much open source, and c) I was willing to give credit to the original developers that I should feel fairly safe in using the code.

I agreed, but felt the need to get a professional legal opinion. My friend Rob was the first to respond:

cssKnowledge { holes: tons }

I've spent the better part of today wrestling with the layout of a page that in theory should probably be much easier to build than it was. A simple two-column fixed-width layout (navigation is left 1/3, content is right 2/3). That part was not what caused me trouble. I used a bastardization of the zeldman.com stylesheet to reliably draw the first two columns. And the two additional columns that appear within the original content section of the page provided little trouble - although a bit more than the first two columns, I'll admit.

Where I ran into serious problems was creating lists in these two nested content columns. More specifically, it was getting the lists to be indented properly (under already indented headings which were themselves indented under another heading). When I would add some margin-left space on the ul tag, the silly thing would actually move left (in some browsers) - the exact opposite behavior I expected. I never did any hardcore box model tests, but I would up putting margin-left values on the li tag instead, and that did the trick.

I think what was going on was that when I set a value for margin-left it actually took out the built-in margin that an unordered list is given, and the margin I was giving it (20px) was actually less than this default vaue. If anyone would like to comment and clue me in to the true cause of this behavior, I'll give you a dollar.

Frankly, I did so many tests and ran the page through browsercam so many times, I don't exactly remember what was going on. I was in "build it and get it to do what you want it to do" mode, not "test it and figure out the root of the problem mode," even though the latter would certainly save me time next time around. With three major sites due in the next 1-3 weeks, I need immediate gratification. (And I won't even go into what a mess the css file is now. No organization whatsoever.)

I'm don't know yet what I learned from this 8-hour exercise down Frustration Lane today, but I hope to soon. All I really found out is that even though I have been able to accomplish really cool things using just CSS for layout over the last few weeks - and indeed I've made great strides along the way - there are serious holes in my understanding of how things interact with each other.