Entries tagged with web standards - MIX Online

Discussing Web Standards with Molly and Jonathan

Joshua Allen — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:45:00 GMT

HTML5 reached working draft status yesterday, and A List Apart just published a thoughtful analysis of IE8's departure from DOCTYPE switching. So what better time to publish our interview with Molly Holzschlag and Jonathan Snook? In this interview, they touch on some of the hot political issues with standards -- a conversation that we'll continue at Web Directions North and MIX08. Enjoy!

Understanding Web Design

Joshua Allen — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:31:00 GMT

Today Zeldman published what will go down in history as one of his best posts ever. Like Donald Norman harping on unusable designs that "probably won an award", or Bill Buxton emphasizing that aesthetics is only a small part of design, Zeldman says that many traditional print designers miss the point when they critique web site design.

Here's an excerpt:

"Efforts to avoid boxiness have been around since 1995; while occasionally successful, they have most often produced aesthetically wretched and needlessly unusable designs. The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.

If she achieves all that and sweats the details, her work will be beautiful. If not everyone appreciates this beauty—if not everyone understands web design—then let us not cry for web design, but for those who cannot see."

Making Your Site Work With Opera

Joshua Allen — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 01:08:00 GMT

Opera is the 4th most popular PC-based browser, with high usage share in Northern and Eastern Europe. They are also the browser for Nintendo Wii and 100 million mobile devices. Opera is well-known for excellent standards support -- their CTO invented CSS, and they are often the first to implement new standards.

I've been working with these guys for awhile, and I recently got the chance to interview Jan and David while they were in Mountain View. We covered a lot of information that will help you avoid proprietary browser behaviors and have your site look as good in Opera as in IE7 or any other modern browser. We also discuss the industry situation a bit.

If you prefer to read text, you can read the transcript here.

Some of the resources mentioned in the interview:

I even encoded the interview in Ogg Theora for playback from the proposed <video> tag in the new Opera Labs build of Kestrel. Enjoy!

Leaflets for iPhone: Beautiful Standards-Based Design

Joshua Allen — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:42:00 GMT

Leaflets are mobile apps for your iPhone, written completely using web standards. Conventional wisdom says that you need to use special SDKs or runtimes to take full advantage of mobile or produce professional-looking rich UI. But the guys at Blue Flavor have proven that it's possible to build a beautiful, responsive, and professional mobile UI based purely on web standards.

The UI is seamlessly integrated with the phone UI, and many operations are sped up for improved responsiveness on the edge network. I asked Brian Fling to give a quick demo of Leaflets, and more importantly, to explain how they managed to do this with web standards.

The video starts with the details about how they built leaflets, and the demo starts about halfway in. Check it out!