OT: Web Designers

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Wed Aug 23 23:17:01 EDT 2006


On 8/23/06, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
>> Perhaps it's time to look into the current galleries of
>> http://www.oswd.org or http://openwebdesign.org
>
> So I went through the favorites galleries on these sites, bumped the
> font size in Firefox up a couple plus'es on each and nearly all the
> designs 'ate themselves'.

  Interesting.  I was curious, so I tried a pseduo-random sampling of
same, and didn't have that problem for most of them.

  I did find that most of the layouts assume a certain page width,
which I find annoying.  If I open up my browser to a full 1650 pixels
wide, 3/4 of the window becomes white space.  Likewise, if I squish it
down to, say, 400 pixels wide, I get horizontal scroll bars.  All the
world is not a PC running at 1024x768.  Some of us have large
monitors.  Others are browsing from cell phones.  *sigh*

> I just long for a model that doesn't require gurus to make accessible
> websites.

  A big part of the problem is PHBs and art fags and so on don't want
to make accessible websites.  They don't even want to make usable
websites.  They want flash and bang and zip and zing.  A 30 second
animinated intro whenever you open the web site.  Scrolling news
banners.  The BLINK tag.

> I like CSS, but CSS positioning can't be right if so many
> people have such a hard time doing conceptually simple things with it.

  Another big issue is that CSS does not override the HTML design goal
I pointed out previously.  CSS is, essentially, a series of "hints" on
how to render HTML.  Variations are still allowed, if not actively
encouraged.

  If you want PDF, you know where to find it.  :-)

-- Ben



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