Acidus wrote:

Publishing on the Web is very different from older methods of publication. A Web publication is inherently a general, device-independent and program-independent document with structural markup. The presentation of a document may vary greatly, and it must vary, to allow viewing (or hearing) the same document on a wide variety of devices, ranging from wristwatch monitors to full-size movie screens.

Why the fuck don't we get this yet? We've been doing this for 17 years now, and for all the trendy lip service arty web geeks pay to upholding "web standards" we still end up with shit like this. Got a large screen? Too bad. Fixed margins. Pixel offsets. You *will* look at this webpage this way and no other way (unless you want to write your own style sheet to use my horribly named DOM classes that is).

Just try to increase the font size on any "modern" webpage and watch it utterly break.

We have jumped from enforcing design through diarrhea of the TABLE tag in the 90s, to enforcing design through obscenely complex CSS styles. It's the same damn thing.

You're not going to start running Opera or something are you?

i confess i don't get this
i know u know much more than me about this acidus but i don't see the arguments as presented in the article as self evident
i don't want all the web pages i visit to look the same
i enjoy a varied and interesting visual journey as well as one of content
i am a fundamentally visual person
idealogically i like the idea of the reader/user being in control
but the situation will evolve
you are setting out an idealogical position -- an arguably extremist and certainly presciptive position -- "things should be like this"
they may well move to that point but you're fighting 500 years of print tradition and the written tradition of the monks with their extraordinary layouts before that (in the west) calligraphy (in the east)
visual style is important
it is an element of semiotics
i'm reminded of those (who i strongly sympathise with) who rail against fashion -- high street fashion -- alternative fashion -- music fashion etc --- fine we should be individuals but we're fundamentally not -- some are more individualistic than others but fashion is an element of fitting in and being social -- we mirror the behaviour of others - that is part of the social dialogue and multi-threaded discourse -- i'm influenced a little by x and a little by y -- i identify to an extent with a particularly group, with a particular set of values, with a particular set of ideas. It is not merely a question of corporate identity. It is a statement on a fundamental level about who i'm as an individual and how I see myself fitting into society. To assert a visual style is content.
I'm not suggesting you are wrong but i do think there is more to this than technical questions.

i confess i don't get this
i know u know much more than me about this acidus but i don't see the arguments as presented in the article as self evident
i don't want all the web pages i visit to look the same
i enjoy a varied and interesting visual journey as well as one of content
i am a fundamentally visual person
idealogically i like the idea of the reader/user being in control
but the situation will evolve
you are setting out an idealogical position -- an arguably extremist and certainly presciptive position -- "things should be like this"
they may well move to that point but you're fighting 500 years of print tradition and the written tradition of the monks with their extraordinary layouts before that (in the west) calligraphy (in the east)
visual style is important
it is an element of semiotics
i'm reminded of those (who i strongly sympathise with) who rail against fashion -- high street fashion -- alternative fashion -- music fashion etc --- fine we should be individuals but we're fundamentally not -- some are more individualistic than others but fashion is an element of fitting in and being social -- we mirror the behaviour of others - that is part of the social dialogue and multi-threaded discourse -- i'm influenced a little by x and a little by y -- i identify to an extent with a particularly group, with a particular set of values, with a particular set of ideas. It is not merely a question of corporate identity. It is a statement on a fundamental level about who i'm as an individual and how I see myself fitting into society. To assert a visual style is content.
I'm not suggesting you are wrong but i do think there is more to this than technical questions.

[ I agree with this completely and will add my own completely separate argument that's based on pragmatism, devoid of artistic consideration.

That argument is that since you can't trust the user agents to actually do what they're supposed to do, developing a web page is aiming at a moving target already, even just for the PC platform. Try to evolve that to be universally readable on cell phones, screen readers, and all the rest... it's an exercise in absolute madness.

I recall my Second Disillusionment about 5 years ago, when CSS was new to me and i said to myself "Wow, this is smart, separate layout and content... brilliant!" So i get right into it, read the spec, learned the spec, read some books and web sites and started to see just how much bullshit you had to go through because of varying support for the specifications. Well, for IE do this shit, and then opera might freak out, because it's hella strict, and firefox will deal, but take 35 seconds to render.

So most people are happy to say, fuck it, ok, if the UA is going to ignore or fuck up half my work, I'll go with a print-emulating look that i don't even have to develop -- just grab a template and tweak the CSS. I did. And that was... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

You want me to accept that the users should now become their own UI designers? Doesn't sound good to me. I may not know much about UI, but I know that my generic, fixed width, locked down site design is at least capable of conveying the relevant content to a large percentage of the public.

I don't want a different customized UI's for every user or user agent. I want adaptive UIs.

My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.

Acidus wrote:

This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.

and what would that consist of?
the article seems to take a radical position
that there is a clear dichotomy between style and content
but style modifies the meaning of content
in the same way that punctuation modifies meaning in text
clearly i frequently write in note form without punctuation
years ago I read Molly's soliloquy in James Joyce's Ulysses and saw that certain elements aren't essential for meaning
but
they make it more readable, accessable and friendly
I write how I think and often will polish afterwards.
I wonder whether chasing the Blue Bird of design that fits every platform is realistic but the efforts to produce flexible UI are very important

when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

yes
the goal is communication
flexibility is a challenge
u want a UI to be like a marine. Whom I understand from TV and Hollywood are trained to obey orders and to adapt (AIAO Adapt Improvise and Overcome).
There are too many UIs like Denholm Elliott's character in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Indiana Jones: ...he'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the grail already.
[Cut to middle of fair in the Middle East, Marcus Brody wearing bright suit and white hat, sticking out like sore thumb]
Marcus Brody: Uhhh, does anyone here speak English?

adam wrote:

and what would that consist of?
the article seems to take a radical position
that there is a clear dichotomy between style and content
but style modifies the meaning of content
in the same way that punctuation modifies meaning in text

The CSS for the SPI Labs blog shows what I think are bad decisions. Use of width to force and maintain certain sizes. Clipping element overflow, etc.

However you do bring up a very good point that I was overlooking, that style affects content quite a bit. Yes, HTML now has <strong> instead of <b> to allow the content creator to denote a certain feeling. But how do you denote sarcasm without a style?

You also get major props for using the Penelope chapter in your argument! :-)

I wonder whether chasing the Blue Bird of design that fits every platform is realistic but the efforts to produce flexible UI are very important.

I don't want perfection on every platform. I don't even want support for every platform. What I want is the removal of unnecessary restrictions. "Why do you choice that font size?" "So it will fit in my presized box." "Why does your box have to be that size?" "... well ... because... it just is." "Would it hurt your site to made that padding relative, or to allow the boxes to expand?" "... I'm not sure. I guess not."

You want a great example of unintrusive UI. Take a look at the calendar/clock widget on Google's personal page. It resizes itself and changes what info it the displays based on screen real estate. Sure, in a smaller mode maybe you aren't getting the exact artistic or stylistic effect you wanted.

People need to ask themselves : If what you are creating is required to be viewed a very exacting or particular way to get benefit from it, is HTML really the proper medium?

Acidus wrote:

You also get major props for using the Penelope chapter in your argument! :-)

cool but i've no idea what that is (the Indiana Jones bit? *puzzled*)

i'm just starting to learn all this
and i have a confession
on my site i use tables for layout and yes i know it's a terrible sin and i feel like i'm at an AA meeting
"hi my name's Adam and i use tables"
but they work

however if there is a better alternative - that's easy to use - then i'm more than ready to listen and learn

adam wrote:

Acidus wrote:

You also get major props for using the Penelope chapter in your argument! :-)

cool but i've no idea what that is (the Indiana Jones bit? *puzzled*)

i'm just starting to learn all this
and i have a confession
on my site i use tables for layout and yes i know it's a terrible sin and i feel like i'm at an AA meeting
"hi my name's Adam and i use tables"
but they work

however if there is a better alternative - that's easy to use - then i'm more than ready to listen and learn

Penelope is the name of the last chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, where Molly has her stream of consciousness presentation.

Also, if you look at Memestreams, you'll see it is table drive too. However, it is written so that it expands or contracts to a persons screen size

Acidus wrote:

adam wrote:

Acidus wrote:

You also get major props for using the Penelope chapter in your argument! :-)

cool but i've no idea what that is (the Indiana Jones bit? *puzzled*)

i'm just starting to learn all this
and i have a confession
on my site i use tables for layout and yes i know it's a terrible sin and i feel like i'm at an AA meeting
"hi my name's Adam and i use tables"
but they work

however if there is a better alternative - that's easy to use - then i'm more than ready to listen and learn

Penelope is the name of the last chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, where Molly has her stream of consciousness presentation.

Also, if you look at Memestreams, you'll see it is table drive too. However, it is written so that it expands or contracts to a persons screen size

it's 20 years since i read it so you'll have to forgive me
re tables ahh i've used percentages for my widths for my tables and td's too so now i don't feel such a fool for having done so
cheers dude

Acidus wrote:

I don't want a different customized UI's for every user or user agent. I want adaptive UIs.

My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.

An adaptive UI might not be that simple. If the blog did adapt its margins to fit that width to 1400 pixels you might end up with several very long line of texts. The more words per line you allow the harder the text becomes to read from line to line. The adaptation might not be much better than the re-flow of the menu. If you compound this problem with the fact that some users will choose to bump their font size to 100 pixels tall so they can read it across the room, there's a point at which stylistically you can't scale the rest of the graphical information to accommodate. There are some standards, however and they usually push toward the center. The adaptation is going to find a tolerance outside of this probably based on the demand they have for it. If a monitor size is found to be the most flexible overall for a given project, this would be the default and would probably cover the widest gamut of viewers. There are extreme examples of where you might want to throw in exceptions, such as alternative styles for mobile devices. Large monitors might be somewhat harder to adapt for a few reasons. First, it would usually produce a similar effect as the smaller monitors without much change. Second, the aspect is going to be widely diverse at this point. It's hard to predict whether you want to alter the layout for an uber wide or uber long screen. Flexible columns could get a bit unwieldy. Users who work at these sizes usually have a wider diversion of font sizes they prefer to view at which would make the exceptions you plan for fork and do unpredictable communist things to the page. Now that monitors themselves are getting larger and larger, standards are likely to push the center up, there is only so much tolerance one will efficiently be able to plan for and still say what they want, how they wish to say it.

Some people don't like newspapers because of their ungainly mess. Most people fix this by folding and sorting the paper how they like. Maybe its time that we need browsers that can intelligently "fold" information in standard ways.

terratogen wrote:

Acidus wrote:

I don't want a different customized UI's for every user or user agent. I want adaptive UIs.

My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

When a user enters in a bunch of text into a comment block and it appears as one long line going right over the pretty floating table of content, thats a problem.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

This can be fixed, and it doesn't require you hacking around IE6 lacks of PNG transparency or Safari's crazy JavaScript. It's making smart decisions about how you define the layout of a page.

An adaptive UI might not be that simple. If the blog did adapt its margins to fit that width to 1400 pixels you might end up with several very long line of texts. The more words per line you allow the harder the text becomes to read from line to line. The adaptation might not be much better than the re-flow of the menu. If you compound this problem with the fact that some users will choose to bump their font size to 100 pixels tall so they can read it across the room, there's a point at which stylistically you can't scale the rest of the graphical information to accommodate. There are some standards, however and they usually push toward the center. The adaptation is going to find a tolerance outside of this probably based on the demand they have for it. If a monitor size is found to be the most flexible overall for a given project, this would be the default and would probably cover the widest gamut of viewers. There are extreme examples of where you might want to throw in exceptions, such as alternative styles for mobile devices. Large monitors might be somewhat harder to adapt for a few reasons. First, it would usually produce a similar effect as the smaller monitors without much change. Second, the aspect is going to be widely diverse at this point. It's hard to predict whether you want to alter the layout for an uber wide or uber long screen. Flexible columns could get a bit unwieldy. Users who work at these sizes usually have a wider diversion of font sizes they prefer to view at which would make the exceptions you plan for fork and do unpredictable communist things to the page. Now that monitors themselves are getting larger and larger, standards are likely to push the center up, there is only so much tolerance one will efficiently be able to plan for and still say what they want, how they wish to say it.

Some people don't like newspapers because of their ungainly mess. Most people fix this by folding and sorting the paper how they like. Maybe its time that we need browsers that can intelligently "fold" information in standard ways.

There are some cool ideas in here. I agree with Kerry: UI is hard to do and very very hard to get right. Worse, "right" is a moving target.

Acidus wrote:

My mom is not going to design her own style style for a website. But when my mom bumbs the font size of http://www.cnn.com up 2 levels and suddenly the menu bar is going off the screen and text doesn't fit in boxes anymore, that's is a problem.

Agreed, though I'm not convinced that issue is 100% the fault of the page author. I don't think the tools available really are sufficient. If a layout is to stay consistent when the text is upsized, for example, then a whole cascade of changes to the rest of the layout may be required. I should probably widen the content area so the text doesn't have 3 words per line. But if the screen resolution is 800x600 (as it often is) then perhaps I'm off the screen, so I have to find out how big the browser window is and try to fit to that. Since I'm so constrained, maybe the solution is to remove my navigation sidebar so that it's not taking up so much horizontal space, so i now have to dynamically recreate that navigational content in a bottom bar or something. None of that's impossible, but it's a far cry from the trivial effort you seem to imply.

Fundamentally, the ability to resize the text you're reading without fucking up the rest of the layout is a pretty new problem and one that not a lot of people are equipped to deal with. I repeat, UI design is hard. People -- perhaps especially programmers -- aren't good at it, as a rule.

When I have a 1400x900 screen and a blog renders as a thin vertical strip maybe 700 pixels across thats just silly.

Ok, but you're .5% of the population. Not to be a dick, but in my role as a web developer with limited resources, I probably don't care much about you. I care about the vast majority of the browsing population who are still rocking 800x600 or 1024x768.

I'm sympathetic to your argument that a site should be able to handle all of those situations dynamically. Maybe I'm not smart enough, and I'm certainly not a web genius, but I really don't believe it's pure laziness that this doesn't happen. If it was trivial, someone would be doing it.

I've only got a vague notion of how I'd do it, because it's not just a matter of jacking text up and widening the box that text is in. You actually have to add a fair bit of logic to the page, detailing how to handle various situations.

I dunno, maybe I'm over (under?) thinking this or something.

k wrote:

Acidus wrote:

Agreed, though I'm not convinced that issue is 100% the fault of the page author. I don't think the tools available really are sufficient. [SNIP]

I'm sympathetic to your argument that a site should be able to handle all of those situations dynamically. Maybe I'm not smart enough, and I'm certainly not a web genius, but I really don't believe it's pure laziness that this doesn't happen. If it was trivial, someone would be doing it.

I've only got a vague notion of how I'd do it, because it's not just a matter of jacking text up and widening the box that text is in. You actually have to add a fair bit of logic to the page, detailing how to handle various situations.

I dunno, maybe I'm over (under?) thinking this or something.

Its not uber hard. Most people are using preexisting templates. Solve these problems in Blogger, Wordpress, MovableType, and you solve a large part of it.

I wrote some client side code for the upcoming upgrade to Memestreams that will allow pictures in posts. It using JavaScript t o dynamically resize an image to fit in a certain dimensions while preserving the aspect ratio. I should look at writing some JavaScript to dynamically so-called "hard" styles directives like width and wrapping based on client side user conditions like screen size, etc. This way, you don't need to be a HTML ninja.

Acidus wrote:

k wrote:

Acidus wrote:

Agreed, though I'm not convinced that issue is 100% the fault of the page author. I don't think the tools available really are sufficient. [SNIP]

I'm sympathetic to your argument that a site should be able to handle all of those situations dynamically. Maybe I'm not smart enough, and I'm certainly not a web genius, but I really don't believe it's pure laziness that this doesn't happen. If it was trivial, someone would be doing it.

I've only got a vague notion of how I'd do it, because it's not just a matter of jacking text up and widening the box that text is in. You actually have to add a fair bit of logic to the page, detailing how to handle various situations.

I dunno, maybe I'm over (under?) thinking this or something.

Its not uber hard. Most people are using preexisting templates. Solve these problems in Blogger, Wordpress, MovableType, and you solve a large part of it.

I wrote some client side code for the upcoming upgrade to Memestreams that will allow pictures in posts. It using JavaScript t o dynamically resize an image to fit in a certain dimensions while preserving the aspect ratio. I should look at writing some JavaScript to dynamically so-called "hard" styles directives like width and wrapping based on client side user conditions like screen size, etc. This way, you don't need to be a HTML ninja.

[ It's a conversation I'm interested to have, because I'm with you... I think things should be better.

Fundamentally, it's not just an issue of allowing things to resize without breaking the layout... it's an issue of *changing* the layout to better fit the current window size/resolution/font size parameters. It's not about designing a structure, but designing a series of structures, defining the usage modes for each and writing the logic to transform from one to another. With JS and CSS I don't even think this is "hard" in the sense of requiring excessive skill, but it's hugely time consuming and ultimately falls victim to cost/benefit analysis.

Sometimes it seems like you're mostly talking about using relative sizing, though I know you're thinking much deeper than that. Still, to touch on that topic, I've had *very* mixed results using percentages for my DIV's and so forth. This gets back to the issue of not knowing how the UA is going to treat your code. I had situations where I'd resize the window and my content area being specified to wrap, and dynamically sized as a percentage, somehow text would get lost under the scrollbar. As if the width of the scrollbar wasn't being accounted for properly. The problem didn't happen when the box was fixed width. This is, of course, nothing I could really control... the browser was broken. Those sorts of bugs do get fixed, but in the short term, it made me abandon percentage based layouts.

Having designed internal sites for the government, I've had to learn all kinds of accessibility guidelines in order to comply with section 508 regulations. That kind of thing is good, no question, but in my experience, the result is a less rich interface, because the alternative is just too expensive in terms of developer time. It may be possible to offload some of the effort into a code framework, but the multiple page designs still need to be handled by humans. -k]