Web Design Luminary Jeff Zeldman

While we're waiting for Metallica and Douglas Adams to get back to us, we might as well go back to interviewing "normal" people. This week's (first) guest is Jeff Zeldman, Web designer extraordinaire. Some people in the design business say the best way to learn what the WWW will look like in six months is to keep up with Jeff's famous www.zeldman.com site. Whether or not this is true, he's certainly written one of the best Web design tutorials ever, and is also one of the prime movers behind the Web Standards Project. There is simply no one better to answer any Web design question you care to post below (hopefully confining yourself to one question per post).

Reverse scenario question...

Have you ever seen anything come from a browser publisher "extending" a standard (Microsoft, Netscape, other), and thought "Gee, I wish that was in the standard"? Examples?

Bringing up new windows is an arrogant sin

I hate it when I click on a hyperlink on somebody's web site and I find it popping up a new window. 99% of the time, it's unnecessary except to satisfy the ego of someone whose page is so important they want it to remain onscreen while I visit the linked-to site. This is pure arrogant self-indulgence and that goes for Zeldman too.

Listen, you "gods" of website design, and listen well: if I want a new window, I'll pop it up myself! I appreciate it that you know so much more about the Internet than I do, and that I'm fortunate to have found a web site that is willing to help me so much by popping up new windows... BUT NO THANKS! I know when I want a new window popped up, and I know how to work my browser well enough do so. So leave my windows alone! Your web site isn't so fscking special that it deserves to create its own new kind of segregation. SO CUT IT OUT!

--Jim

Banners

This is only vaguely related to design, but directly related to the web, and functionality.

We all know that banners don't work anymore. The only way a business can profit from banners is to show thousands per day. Most users don't even SEE banners anymore. We avoid them the same way we dig in the couch for the remote when commercials interrupt The Simpsons.

Do you have any suggestions to make future, content-based sites profitable?

Here's another question ...

Dear Mr. best ever,

Why do you render my status bar useless with javascript mouseovers? Are you trying to disguise the state-of-the-art directory structure behind your site?

Of the recent 5k contest [sylloge.com], which design did you like the best?

Jeff, your CSS suck

I quote from your website:

H1 {font: bold 24px verdana, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; margin-top: 0xp;}
H4 {font: 12px verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px;}

So why, tell me, WHY did you use PIXELS (px) instead of POINTS (pt), thereby overriding my painfully crafted DPI settings, rendering your all page unviewable on my Linux machine?

Here's my question:

If you're such a hotshot web designer, why have you committed one of the cardinal sins of web design: Putting an "entry page" that does nothing but suck bandwidth and make it difficult to "back" out of a site?
--
Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?

WaSP and motivational activities

Sir:

Considering the somewhat lacking support for the features in the current specification of the W3C in both of the large-scale browsers (and some of the smaller ones), what do you feel is the best way to motivate them to become as compliant as possible? If it was as simple as users urging them, it would probably be done now. But Microsoft and Netscape still seek their own forms of 'embrace and extend' on their browsers. Any ideas as to how to try and get them to pay more attention to the standards?
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I have a question:

What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?

A question

As I see it, web page requirements are diversifying, but web languages (such as the newer HTML standards) are increasingly confining, as they explicitly specify layout, l&f, etc.

Do you think that current web standards will leave out more and more people as they get "fancier"?

And, if so, do you think that there is a need for a fresh start, in which browsers intelligently determine the appearance, from a user's specification, and in which servers deliver only the raw information?

User Control

Now that web designers are more and more gaining the ability to control how their pages look, users seem to have less and less.

Old school web programmers indicate this is a terrible loss. New web designers, many influenced by the firmly established print world, feel the opposite.

Do you feel that the designer, or the user, should have ultimate control?

Readers or Advertisers

There was a time when media would compete for readers to generate revenue from sales of the media but now the empasis seems to be to get readers to impress advertisers to part with money.

When you design a web site should it be for the benefit of users or the benefit of page impression (i.e. splitting an article over three pages so the user gets three banner ads) and how do you balance that?
.oO0Oo.

mod this guy to 5

Slashdot and Zeldman are having a real laugh over this one. This is an obvious setup. I think what they're really doing is categorizing the intelligence of /. user into 4 groups:

1. Clueless people who look at the site, think it's neat, and ask Zeldman a serious question.

2. Smart but angry people who love to flame at the slightest opportunity.

3. Paranoid people determined to expose the hidden motives behind everything.

4. Ultrageeks who have seen this trick before and, recognizing the brilliance, go on to ask an interesting question about web design.

So my question: Are there any examples of your actual web design? Can we see them?

Pixel based alignment and HTML

One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?

As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use <font size=1> to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font. Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.

As another example, many pages use the <table>, and <layer> to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.

What are standards groups doing to fix this? Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement <table width=30ch> to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?

--Bob

Why is this site in "Flyspeck 1" font?

I don't care about the "ugliness" of the site that many people complained about. I care about content rather than style. I'll return again and again to the ugliest site in the world, as long as it has content that I am interested in.

As to whether the site has any content at all, I can not tell. It displays on my Sun workstation in a font that is only very slightly more readable than a "greeked" iconized xterm. That is, by putting my nose up against the CRT and squinting real hard, I can make out about one word in three.

Netscape on the Sun does not have the ALT-[ ALT-] commands to increase and decrease the font, so in order to read this page, I would have to either "Show Source" and read the HTML source, or go into my Netscape preferences and tell it "Reasonable size font, and use my font no matter what the idiot document says to use." This *sometimes* helps; I haven't tried it with this site. Since he's going so far as to specify his page at the pixel level, I suspect this might be one of the sites whose author has taken great pains to override all reader preferences.

I hate setting the "use only my font" config, because sites which use reasonable fonts often use them for reasonable purposes, and I don't want to lose that in my web browsing.

Normally, sites that are so thoroughly unreadable as this one, I hit the "Back" button on my browser. That's what I did with this one.

("Small favors" department: At least he didn't render his preferred page layout into a .GIF file. I have seen pages like that.)

(Desired feature for Mozilla: A "minimum font size" config tag which triggers a "display everything in Times-Roman 12, period, no exceptions" rule.)

Rollovers... is there a point ?

Your site uses rollovers at almost every opportunity.

What do they add to the users experience ?

Do you agree with Nielsen?

I have no idea about you and your views, but I have read lots of the Alertbox [useit.com] columns by Jakob Nielsen.

Do you agree with him? Do you disagree? What about?

At least you share the use of TITLE attributes in hyperlinks (a good feature that Slashdot shouldn't chomp away).
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Patents and Standards

Jeff --

I know you're part of the whole Web Standards Project [webstandards.org]. A key plank in the platform seems to be fighting the placement of propietary interests above baseline support for standards, as seen in the recent IE 5.5 for Win-32 brouhaha. To me it seems that one could change a few words, and phrase the following question:

What is your stance on the apparent shift of the web from an open community to one ruled by territorialism and propetism, i.e. web and software patents?

Just curious Jeff....

----

Not to flame, but...

I find it hard to ask HTML questions to someone who has committed the cardinal sin of taking away the status bar with JavaScript.

How far has Netscape fallen?

While trying to maintain a deisgn that looks decent in both Internet Explorer 3/4/5 and Netscape 3/4, I've become more and more frustrated with Netscape with each iteration of thier browser (their Preview Release 1, based on Mozilla, doesn't look too encouraging to me either). How far do you think they have fallen behind Microsoft's IE in compatibility and performance of HTML? Specifically, how bad are Netscape's problems with CSS, JavaScript, iframes, and the myriad other gripes developers hold for it?

Do you think 6.0 will bring it close to IE's level of functionality?

where's the interview

Jeff, I programmed for a web design company in which design issues totally trumped more practical concerns like download time. (In one case, I was forced to create absurdly complex html tables just so that the designer could get his one-pixel rounded corners on his notecard design.) What do you see as the appropriate balance between aesthetics and practical usability?

P.S. That company is now out of business, thank goodness!

-- Diana Hsieh

Uhh...

So how, exactly, do garish background colors, illegible typefonts, a pointless splash-screen home page, and non-standard navigational cues (e.g. non underlined links) help make for a "well-designed" site? I'm having a hard time understanding it. My instinct is to let the defaults rule -- if the user of my sites wants to use dark grey letters on a deep black page, hey, that's her business -- my job is just to get her the material. Whatever works well for her is fine by me. But then, I'm not a fancy web designer.

I can see where exciting design tricks are usful for, say, a magazine or TV show. But on the web, where I for one am working with a low resolution monitor and (often) a text based connection, and where others may be using anything from IE5 on a shiny new Mac to the default browser on a Palm VII, I have a hard time seeing the point in making flashy 'designed' web pages. The 'benefit' of having to turn off javascript just to be able to read the font that looked best on your monitor just doesn't work for me. But then again, I'm not the fancy web designer, I'm just a happy little page minimalist.

At least your pages seem to work okay when I disable the gadgetry -- that's an excellent start. And it also looks okay in Lynx -- an easy thing to do, but too often overlooked (as it translates into "looking good" on palmtops, for search engines, and on alternative browsers for e.g. the blind). I give you points for that. But I still don't see the point -- the benefit -- of all the flashiness. Maybe it's just my sense of aesthetics -- I like a nice clean simple site, without all the trappings (think photo.net [photo.net]. Different strokes...

I guess that's the gist of my question though: when there are so many benefits to having a straightforward, Lynx friendly site, and when it takes so much effort to get an "enhanced" site to degrade to the older level, what exactly do you gain by the effort? What, in short, makes it worthwhile?

Evaluate Slashdot

What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot [slashdot.org]?
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Alistapart

I've seen a lot of criticism of your Zeldman.com site here in these forums. I've been reading alistapart [alistapart.com] recently, and I think the design there is very pleasing to the eye.
Are you trying more experimental stuff with your peronal site that you wouldn't try with a commercial site like alistapart?
What other sites have you done recently that you are proud of?
Why haven't the dead ads been updated recently? No good ones coming in?

Web != Print != TV

I work as a web programmer. The company where I work was recently acquired by a high-profile (for my location) communications firm. The new company has great print skills, but almost everyone here is old-school.

About once a day, I find myself telling one of the suits that "The web is not print."

My question: Do you have any suggestions for getting the traditional artists of the world to recognize the web as a new medium, and not just print-on-a-monitor?

Optimism?

How hopeful are you that Microsoft can be coaxed into making IE
standards compliant? What exactly do you think Microsoft's motive was
in not supporting HTML 4.0 completely?

Balancing Technologies

As you are no doubt aware, the technology that drives web site design is advancing rapidly. However, there are still a lot of users who run older browsers, or prefer to use text-only browsers such as Lynx.

Obviously, one wants to reach as large an audience as possible, but not "lag behind" too far. How do you go about balancing the use of newer technology on a site without alienating users of older software, disabled users, and text-only browsers?

--

Form Over Content, revised

I think there's too much concern on the web with form over content. Slashdot is a prime example, this is not the optimal form, but nevertheless they provide enough entertaining, timely, and relevant content that they have tons and tons of ridiculously loyal readers. This is because, of course, the best content is the sum of the users themselves, which /. achieves perfectly.
And I think orange is ugly, so I don't dig zeldman's site. It's just too bright

Here's some content for ya, if you care about your feedom at all, vote for Ralph Nader! [votenader.com]
And is he really a great web designer? He has a broken link right on the front page... http://www.zeldman.com/orson.html is what the "if movies had been websites" points to. And the mozilla link is broken too. [zeldman.com]

What we need is a daily page done by an AI personality, now that'll be cool



___________________________
Michael Cardenas
http://www.fiu.edu/~mcarde02
http://www.deneba.com/linux

Impact of Mozilla

Zeld-mon, I would just like to hear your two bits about Mozilla, not just as a standards compliant browser (which Gecko certainly is) but as an application deployment platform as some advocates/developers are claiming. If Mozilla does become such a beast, the nature of the game will almost certainly be changed, especially re: Microsoft's desktop domination. Do you see real potential for Mozilla to evolve into such a platform, or are the developers getting over-exuberant? - Rev.