Dave’s post today is a true classic. Classic rock songs performed by people you can’t picture singing them. My favourites are the Pat Boone ones. It’s funny as all get out. The humour here is boundless.

Here I go again, thinking I’ve mentioned something and finding out I haven’t. Rob at bluerobot has been troubleshooting, and actually putting a name to, a phenomenon I had been dismissing. I’ve been experiencing the FOUC, as Rob calls it, for a little while now at certain sites but hadn’t put the pieces together as to what it was, or what might be causing it. Thankfully we have hyper alert people like Rob to do this for us. He’s figured out what causes it and how to get around it, but he’s yet to stumble onto why it happens. The possibility exists that it’s just an IE glitch, but glitch or no glitch, I’d sure like to see it go away.

I would just like to point out that Tim has redesigned the look of his homepage (not that there was anything wrong with the last one), and he’s also working on getting them to validate. Must have had something to do with the winter solstice. It looks great, but it’s made my earlier post sort of obsolete. You do realise that don’t you Tim? heh

I think I have his old design cached around here someplace. Now I’ll have to dig it out. damn.

Greg and I had decided to try our hand at doing some exquisite corpses on the side to fill our creative need. This is the first result. It will get archived here as well, as soon as I get around to finishing up some changes I wanted to make to the site.

When I finally got to assemble the image, all I could say was, “WOW!” I feel it has such amazing imagery in it. There is another corpse still coming, as yet unfinished. Greg and I did two. I started one and he started one. This is the one I started. Can’t wait to see the second one.

I got an email from Dan this morning, wherein it seemed he was having a conversation with Tim about HTML, XHTML, CSS, and tableless sites. Tim was under the impression that sites utilizing valid markup, and adhering to the specifications, would wind up featureless, and devoid of creativity (I’m paraphrasing). I believe he also pointed to Dan’s minimalistic design as his example. Dan knows better, and so do I.

Dan pointed Tim to sites like glish, bluerobot and this here site right here as examples of interesting designs that take advantage of current techniques, and use valid markup as well as conforming to W3C specifications.

I decided to take things a step further. I feel people aren’t getting the message about how simple and efficient it is to use XHTML and CSS to design a site, and I wanted to be able to present Tim with irrefutable evidence that he was flat out WRONG, but in the nicest possible way you understand. I always feel it’s better to teach someone something by using things they know, and are familiar with, like Tim’s own site. So I set about redesigning Tim’s homepage using valid XHTML and CSS. All before my morning coffee.

The layout is a fairly straightforward 2 column layout with what is essentially a header and a footer. It didn’t take long before I had the skeleton of the layout prepared and went about massaging Tim’s content into XHTML validity. This is what took the majority of my time. Searching out all the spots that didn’t validate. I left a few oddball things in there just for the sake of time (I needed my coffee dammit!). All total, the redesign took me about 2 hours or so, the majority of which, as I said, was redoing Tim’s markup. Actual design time was minimal.

From the result, you should see that not only does the redesign look nearly identical to his original, but it also now validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional. Oh yeah, and the CSS validates too. The shame of it all!

Oh ye of little faith.

Well, thanks to my being a member of an exquisite corpse, I now reek of coolness. Exquisite corpse just became the coolstop cool pick for December 20, 2001. Congrats to Heather and Phineas for the concept, and design respectively, and also to the rest of the cast. It’s a team effort. Now, let’s go after that webby!

Jim’s been doing this for some time. I could have sworn I’d linked to it before, but I couldn’t find it. So here you have it. There are some excellent matches. They have more of a fine art feel compared to the original, which has more of a graphic design feel. Then again, I could just shut up and enjoy it without analyzing it.

Strange and vivid dreams had me captivated all night long. It was a vast parade of ex-girlfriends, past friends, and odd reconstructions that left me in a deep melancholy. I have enough of that when I’m awake lately, I don’t need it when I’m trying to sleep.

The ongoing MeFi discussion regarding the WaSP’s decision to take a leave of absence.

My feeling is that the argument put forth by designers who are against the WaSP’s work regarding standards, seems to be about some percieved pontificating. They outright reject the ideas recommended by the WaSP for what seems to be no other reason than to say, “You don’t speak for me and my audience.”

Well true, the WaSP doesn’t speak for all designers. They have never claimed to. They have never come down from the mount with any sort of commandment and said that their recommendations should be implemented at all levels, by every designer working today. In an effort to help the web move forward, all that they have esentially asked is that designers step back and take a broader view. That they look at, understand, and implement where applicable, the current set of recommended standards. In some cases, this broader view might alienate some users. But it is up to the designer to decide if, or where and when, it is appropriate to alienate users.

Now by alienating users, this does not necessarily mean prohibiting users from accessing a site. Far from it. The only thing the WaSP recommendations could cause (unless you were to take it to extremes) by way of alienation is a less visually appealing design for users of older browsers. Properly structured, marked up and laid out, access to information remains unhindered, and the page will actually be available to a broader audience. Since certain presentational elements, that could prevent access to a site by some user agents, can be prevented from being served, the page becomes more inclusive by allowing the information to be accessed by a broader range of user than was previously possible. The argument that information becomes inaccessible falls apart at this point. The only thing that becomes inaccessible is the graphic presentation, and as I stated, if properly marked up and laid out, the page remains quite useable.

The next argument heard from the WaSP’s opposition is about forcing users to upgrade their bowsers. The WaSP has never advocated a forced upgrade of users. They have recommended user education by way of messages explaining that the user’s browser has proved to be unable to display the complete design. I see no reason to discredit this recommendation, since the web is an interactive medium, and user education is always a good thing. There really isn’t a good reason to start explaining about standards to the typical user, but explaining that his browser isn’t suited to a more refined experience on the web isn’t out of bounds in my opinion. Granted, they may not care, but if they don’t care (and your site is still useable, and information is not being held hostage), then that only leaves ego to care whether the graphic presentation gets seen or not. Wanting nearly everyone to gain the same experience from your work is ego. While user experience contributes to the usability of a site, designing useable sites should be the fundamental point. Yes, designers get paid for their expertise in wielding the tools of the web and doing it well. So that’s exactly the point. Use your expertise to design sites that ultimately are useable by everyone. They will still be experienced by the majority of users. It’s no less work than trying to get a layout to render the same in all browsers on all platforms. In fact it’s less work. Which brings me to my final point.

The last argument always seems to be that there is more coding, and hence more work involved in creating websites which adhere to standards. Flat out untrue. Sites that adhere to current W3C recommended standards, and which separate content from presentation, are cleaner, and are more easily parsed and rendered across a variety of user agents, and ultimately lighter in terms of bytes, which makes downloading the page easier on users with slow connections or modems. The usual work still applies. Preproduction and forethought about your audience and how best to present your information to your potential users. Designing with standards in mind presents no extra work except to the designer who has no experience working with the current standards.

The bizarreness[sp?] of the world never ceases to amaze me, but I have to admit I laughed.