OK, so this topic has been debated quite a few times in the last several months, and I’m certainly not reinventing the wheel here, but just leaving my two cents, as usual.

The question is: can we drop support, or at least strongly reconsider the way we look at that “old cousin that nobody likes but you can’t avoid inviting for the Christmas dinner”?. IE6, that is, and that quote should be from Zeldman, I think.

As you might guess there are a lot of different opinions on the matter, and none of them can be considered as the ultimate truth. My opinion is, as the title to this article suggests, that we can’t cut off like 20-25-30% of visitors that each day come visiting our website. Many many times, the fact that they’re using this dinosaur of our days’ technology isn’t their choice at all.

Some (not sure what percentage, though) of them are forced to do so, or aren’t geek enough to know alternatives. So, they’re good guys, after all, many times they’re not guilty of anything, and so they deserve to get our juicy contents just like other people do. For those who stick to crappy browsers, ignoring the fact that they’re basically stealing precious hours of web developers’ even more precious lives, because they’re too lazy, I can’t help. Also, browsers are free: why the hell one shouln’t be willing to switch to a better thing that won’t cost a penny?

So, should we surrender to a jurassic way of styling? Again the title of the article helps us: nope!

I’ve always thought that designing for the Web is all about making compromises. There’s some stuff out there that would be ready for prime time, if not for IE6 (and 7, don’t forget v7!), sure; but we are supposed to be smart and skilled enough to overcome this obstacles.

For instance, IE is both providing the problem and the means to the solution: conditional comments. They’re ugly, they’re proprietary, but in a situation like this I feel like they’re our best weapon. With that technique we can target specific browser versions, and ensure that the content is OK every time.

So, my advice is to always design and build stuff using a modern browser as reference. If you’re extreme enough, you can even use WebKit, which usually implements advanced stuff first. Then, when you’re done with your hyper-cool layout with all the fancy stuff in it, you can turn the IE spotlight on, and make the needed corrections.

What does that mean? It means that you’re wasting time, in the short period, because you have to write two, or three different stylesheets. But writing one good main stylesheet is priceless, because in the long term, when newer, and supposedly better, browsers will come along, your work will be already done and you won’t need any more fine tuning.

So, it’s a matter of time and since you’re wasting it, when designing your master stylesheet, you should take as many shortcuts as you can, whether they are advanced CSS selectors, or rounded corners, or even revolutionary ways to lay things out.

Then you go on and fix stuff for IE, bearing in mind that things must not necessarily appear exactly the same, that little imperfections may be acceptable, as long as the content and its message are preserved. It’s not the visual look of the website that should be pixel perfect, it’s the branding aspect of it, the overall feeling, the stuff that connotates a service or a product you’re selling, that needs, this is mandatory, to be delivered as it is, no matter what the device.

At this point, one might note that this very site doesn’t feature an IE specific stylesheet. Yet. So, for now I’m not practicing what I’m preaching, and while I’m not sure when I will actually find the time to do that for this site too, I’ve been pondering about the problem for quite a while.

I came to the conclusion that not to exclude IE6 users, we could do like we do for mobile phones: it might not be great, but why not a single-column layout? Dead simple, and worries-free. OK, that might be too simple, but you get the point, right: simplify things! The content would be there, the overall theme of the site would be mostly preserved, and the site would end up to be just a simplified version of the real one. That’s just an idea, anyway, a banal one perhaps, but I’m probably go that way to kinda offer a basic support for legacy browsers.

So, what?

While we’re no superheroes, we have a mission. In early 2000’s it was spreading Web Standards. Right now, what we gotta do is harder and more subtle. By targeting specific browsers, intentionally producing worse-looking versions of our sites, and by displaying messages only to users of those browsers, we need to get them, especially the lazy ones, aware of the fact that browsers doesn’t differ much from the rest of the technology we use.

So if generally we’re conscious of it and we accept the fact that, say, a cell phone (or a television, a radio, a computer, you name it) bought five years ago has less features than one that will come out tomorrow that is generally better, we must make it so that people apply the same thinking to browsers too.

This is true, to a certain extent, in the sense that it’s a matter of cause and effect: technology is spreading all over, more and more people get to use the computer in a more conscious way, word processors are easy to use and they offer the option to save a file with an .html extension. That’s it. This small list leads to the fact that anyone can publish something on the Web. Then they say, ‘Hey, I know a little Photoshop too!’, and there you go with the general opinion that doing websites is a fairly easy task, that doesn’t require a deep knowledge.

Now, publishing stuff is easy as pie, but doing websites, and making them well, is a whole different story.

Anyway, this belief to me is the key to understand why, in my opinion, our work is underestimated.

For example, I don’t think I’ll ever find someone who, say, believes that doing the work that architects do is an easy task. That’s because doing stuff in the architecture field requires a proper education, knowledge of materials, physics, aesthetics, and so on. So they get the respect they deserve, as they have notions that you don’t and that are essential to their work.

This goes for Web-related professions too, like usability experts, or information architects and so on. And it’s for the very same reason. They have what we don’t: a proper, formal education on those particular fields.

With us people who make websites, things are different. First of all it’s because there aren’t real certifications about our work, nor proper college classes that teach what we do. I think that the vast majority of us self-teaches stuff, by reading books and articles on the Web.

Then, it’s because, just like Zeldman said at some conference, there are a dozen different terms we use to identify our work. That’s not gonna work.

Two little considerations:

1. I don’t think that certifications are needed, for us. The main aspect of the Web is its ability to allow people to communicate, interact, share informations. Being social, that is. So to me it’s not about degrees, or titles. It’s about getting a good reputation. It’s about people knowing you do some work, and you do it well. There couldn’t be a better certification than that, and there couldn’t be a better reward for your working efforts.
2. Concerning classes. Colleges and universities should have them, and they should teach them right. Formal education should give students a direction towards concepts like Web standards, and so on. But the thing about our work, is the fact that we constantly have to sort of update our knowledge. Day by day. Reading books and stuff. So self-teaching is still the best way to get to know things.

OK, so what? I think I can close this one quoting a comment I’ve made on the subject, over at Meagan Fisher’s blog.

This [whole situation, the fact that our profession hasn’t much respect from people] is why, and I back this up with my personal experience, sometimes clients simply refuse to pay the right amount of money required for the job.

It’s not that we’re greedy or something; we’re asking that amount of money because you’re not only buying a site, you’re buying my knowledge as well, the hours I’ve spent reading books and talking with colleagues about the stuff we do.

A website, to me, is still perceived as something optional, something we can live without even if we’re running some sort of business. So while one would pay more to, say, get a better car, that doesn’t necessarily imply that the same guy would do it as well for a piece of furniture or a watch. They’re not so important, compared to a thing that could affect your safety while driving. Perhaps, this is the case for websites too.

In this kaleidoscope of options and possibilities, I sort of get lost when it comes to judge what it’s good and what it’s not. What does it mean the adjective good applied to websites, anyway? Does it mean good-looking? Or good at ease of use? Nah, we need a higher degree of specificity.

We need an example too. The print world comes to mind. You’ve got a piece of paper, say, you paint, write, print your artwork, and the result it’s there, right before your eyes. It is not influenced by external factors. For the Web this is not true.

Every content is accessed via a third party application: the browser. So it’s not a direct connection between the author and the reader. Software gets in the way. And this is good, as software provides the means to avoid the kind of unevennesses we’ve talked about right at the beginning.

Pick a short-sighted person, for example. He/she might not be able to, say, read or distinguish a little detail you’ve so lovely put in your printed handcrafted artwork. No problem: he/she puts glasses on, or makes use of a magnifying glass. The gap between his/her problem and you, the author willing to convey a message, is filled.

A similar, yet more subtle, situation happens with Web pages. Now, the same short-sighted person fires up his/her computer and loads a website that he/she cannot read, as it’s written too small. The deus ex machina role is played by the browser that (should) provides a robust shortcut to bump up the text size for the whole page.

It happens sometimes that this simple and absolutely ordinary and necessary action, kind of messes up the page layout. When it does, that’s not a good page by any means.

So what is a good page, for me? To me, good is something that ensures that its content is kept accessible, yet is able to present it in a nice and appropriate to the context way.

Technically speaking, I love em-based websites because they nicely adapt themselves to different browsing situations. Em-based layouts are spreading more and more, these days, even at corporate level, which is extremely cool, but still too many times I see websites that are just gorgeus when viewed at default text size, but that fail miserably otherwise.

I came to realize that the goodness of a website had very little to do with its graphic look. Or, at least, a lot less than what one could think.

So what? During these years of constant development, I sort of came up with a quick testing routine that gives me a rough clue of how scalable and flexible is the layout I’m designing.

1. Constantly check your code. XHTML validation is essential, and we should not debate over that topic. A slightly different story applies to CSS validation and the use of non standard properties (such as browser specific implementation of rounded corners). With CSS we can experiment a little bit more. For example adding text-shadow where needed could be possible scenario: browsers that already support it will display it. Others won’t, but that’s fine and acceptable, because it won’t cause much harm to the end-user, right?
2. Again concerning CSS, try not to use hacks. For as ugly and proprietary as they might look, use conditional comments to load up additional browser-specific stylesheets.
3. Turn off styling — This will give you a perfectly clear indication of how good your markup is, and will also give you a hint of what a text browser will read. My rule is: ensure that your website is perfecly readable and understandable even without the fancy graphic stuff. This is called graceful degradation, I think.
4. Repeat the above procedure, this time turning off images. Page size is day after day less a concern, with fast connection speed spreading all over, but there definitely are situations where it does matter how much data you’re downloading (think mobile phones). Browsing with no images to reduce loading times it’s a respectable choice by the end-user and should be honoured, hence the end-user should not be penalized by a imageless layout that’s completely messed up or significantly damaged.
5. Bump up your text a couple of times — There’s a nice shortcut that works in most browsers that is ctrl/cmd++. If your layout stays OK after this, you can sleep quietly tonight. If it doesn’t, you should fix that as soon as possible. Always ensure that your layout is flexible enough to accomodate this not-so-rare situation.

Now, there would be a whole lot more to say on this topic, but for now I think I will leave it like this: if a website is able to pass that little checklist above, then it could well being judged as good. It also has a killer look? Then it’s a winner, to me.

What about you? Which criteria come in play when you judge how good a website is?

This time it was different. I still liked the idea behind my design, and its implementation, for the most part. I just felt like there was something I didn’t get right. I perceived it as sort of messy and somewhat distracting, which is for me the epitome of what a design shouldn’t be. So I decided to rethink about it.

Special thanks go to my friend Simone, who helped me in identifying a series of little things that I had missed, and even some usability inconsistencies.

Most of the times it’s the little details that make the difference, and being much more painstaking this time, while striving to maintain the ensemble feeling — the old book type-of thing — surely helped me a lot in developing a more solid design.

The biggest change from the very first release, was the column system. Boom. It seems like an obvious thing, but it changed my judgement completely.

I’m surely not reinventing the wheel, but, really, sticking to a well defined grid gives your product a whole different kind of feeling (even if you can break out of it, but that’s another story).

For some reason I’m not inclined to use any kind of CSS framework (even if some of them are cool, and handy for sure); I always build stuff myself, with only Eric Meyer’s reset stylesheet as a base. Of course, this implies much more thinking and calculations.

Now, since difficulties might lead to laziness, perhaps this was the reason why the first version of this website wasn’t that accurate, in terms of spacing (both horizontal and vertical).

Sticking to a four column layout, each one of them equally spaced, helped me in achieving a kind of balance that simply wouldn’t have been possible, otherwise. I also adopted a 16px base unit for vertical spacing: I’ve tried to stick to that rhythm as much as possible, that means (almost) always ensuring that the sum of leading and text size would be 16px or a multiple of it.

This is my version of “Typography for Dummies” perhaps, but it really is something that I completely ignored just a few months ago and that it is absolutely essential (talk about developing knowledge, I will write something about my Web-related lectures soon).

For those of you wondering, this place still hasn’t IE support. I’m not sure IE6 will ever have one, but I’m definitely planning a testing session with IE7.

Speaking of browsers, this website is OK on Google Chrome too (thanks Webkit). Of course by saying OK I’m referring to the layout, and I’m not considering the uglyquestionable Windows font rendering.

Among other goodies, I’ve created an Elsewhere page, where all the stuff coming from the different pieces of me scattered on the web is collected. Feel free to add me, if you want: I won’t bite.

Why am I saying this? The labels found on every showcase at the National Museum in Prague were written in czech only. That was disappointing. Instead, at the Museum of the History of Medicine, in Vienna, the labels were both in german and english, with different fonts and colours used too. Pleasing, so thumbs up all the way.

I so much liked the typographic stuff in both cities. Prague, with its gothic flavour, has some amazing signs and emblems, really. Vienna too was great from that point of view; in particular the city’s subway signs are all perfectly readable being written in beautiful bold Helvetica.

I loved some of the stuff I’ve found at the MUMOK, Vienna’s museum for modern art, and some great manuscripts and letters at the aforementioned museum of medicine history, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to photograph.

A last thought that is actually an advice. We visited the Schönbrunn castle, right? Beautiful park, really, with amazing colours and ornaments. Inside the imperial apartments, instead, I felt like they were way too glitzy, and somewhat overdone. This is something I did not felt, for example, when I was in Versailles, a couple of years ago — and that’s quite remarkable since Schönbrunn was actually built to sort of compete with it.

While I’m not sure about the causes of this entirely subjective feeling (tiredness, weak light inside the rooms, the summer heat), and while I should reckon that my taste is different from other people’s taste, especially if those people lived centuries ago, one thing is for sure: overdoing things is never good.

Now, setting the list to start counting from a value different than 1 (or, if you prefer, a., A., I., whatever) it is not possible anymore, if you care about XHTML validation. Before XHTML 1.0, there where two options to do that, one being the start attribute of the OL element, and the other, less obvious yet more powerful, a value attribute for the LI element.

Between the two options, I would rather go with the first. It’s the list that starts counting from one particular value, so the semantic information should belong to the list, not its items.

I understand the choice of removing those attributes. From an XML point of view a list that does not start from value 1 it is not the same list as the list that precedes it and that actually starts from value 1, as you need to have them in separate OL elements.

But this choice leaves my quite confused all the same. This, the fact of having an ordered list to start from a value different than 1, is a common typographic and logical need, so what I’m asking with this post is Was it really necessary to get rid of both attributes, since this behaviour isn’t replicable with any other technology we have at disposal, and since any alternative would lack semantic meaning?.

From an author perspective, my answer is no. My two cents: it would make more sense to retain the start attribute, so that this ability is somehow preserved, and add another attribute, such as role in XHTML 2 to semantically link lists that would otherwise be separated entities.

<ol role="toc">
	<li>item</li>
	<li>item</li>
	<li>item</li>
</ol>
<p>...</p>
<ol role="toc" start="4">
	<li>item</li>
	<li>item</li>
	<li>item</li>
</ol>

Does that make at least little sense to you too?

For the record, I lost the count of the first timers specifically related to a blog of mines. I even switched the mother language of it about half a dozen times, seriously. One could question my ability in making choices, and so am I, sometimes.

Anyway, let’s start from scratch and cut it short. This is my new journal, and now and then I will post here various stuff about web design, which, as you know, is my greatest passion (’cause you’ve read my oh-so-beautiful about page, didn’t you?), and its nuances.

Concerning this place, think at it as an open construction site. Some features are still missing (search function anyone?), and many things need to be revised (this site is nowhere near to even have a shadow of support for Internet Explorer, as of today) or written — I’m interested in writing about the process that led me to actually build this thing, might give that a go in the future.

Anyway, the journal. Here it is. I will do my best not to bore you. Promise.