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Web Design Luminary Jeff Zeldman

Posted by Roblimo on Mon May 15, 2000 11:00 AM
from the too-many-awards-to-count dept.
Graphics Software
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).
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Web Design Lumiary Jeff Zeldman 50 Comments More /

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  • 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?
  • I was unable to properly view your site. I received connection errors and failed to successfully download some graphics.

    My question is this: What design elements would you recommend revising in order to better deal with the awesome power of the Slashdot Effect, using your site as the example? ;)
  • I'm using Win95 and IE 5.
    It's too small for convenient reading running at 1024x768 on a 17in monitor.

    Kintanon
  • The point is that MS *used* to be very vocal in supporting standards
    making (rightly) a lot of noise about Netscape's proprietary
    extensions to HTML. But now they're the biggest browser...
  • 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
  • then why the fack don't you, this guy, although a don't agree with all his stuff, is a designer's point of view, "real" designers do it from a practical point of view, there's a difference


    This guy is a 'designer' the same way John Carmack is a Ballet Dancer. Which is to say he isn't. Anyone who uses BRIGHT ORANGE backgrounds with tiny black text had damned well better be color blind to excuse themself. Gawd, maybe the site would be ok if not for the COMPLETELY UNREADABLE color scheme and font size....
    The opening page can be forgiven since I'm on a fast connection, the progress bar hi-jacking is annoying as hell, but I could still live with it, but that color scheme is straight from HELL and needs to go back there.

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



    This one is me.
    I don't care if it is a trick, My LORD man, get that crap off of the web before you blind some innocent passerby or hopelessly corrupt millions who go to the site to get a glimpse of 'How it should be done'.

    Kintanon

  • Hmm.. sounds like basically the same setup I have. 1024x768 on a 17" monitor. I'll agree with the other response here, the font on his site is larger than that of Slashdot. It seems fine to me.

  • Banners (Score:5)

    by TheTomcat (53158) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:25AM (#1072153) Homepage
    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?

  • 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?

  • 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?

  • I worked in the UK web design market for several years.

    During that time it was obvious that (graphic) design lead technology, with Macromedia for example creating flash to meet demand from, rather than inspire, web designers.

    Technology was seen as a way to say 'yes' to the designer's question 'This would be really cool - can we do it?'

    Do you think this is a bad thing, do you think it is as true in the US as in Europe, and do you think it will continue to be the case?
  • Specifically, how bad are Netscape's problems with CSS, JavaScript, iframes, and the myriad other gripes developers hold for it?
    Here's a basic answer. [harvard.edu]
  • When I pull the two pages up side by side Slashdot text is almost twice the size of Zeldman's. But I'm running IE in a larger than normal font size. The text I'm tying right now is half the size of the text of the message I'm replying to above it, this text would be inconvenient. However once I post the message it goes back to the way I like it.

    Kintanon

  • Here's my question: (Score:4)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr (24021) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:03AM (#1072168)
    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 (Score:3)

    by M-2 (41459) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:05AM (#1072172) Homepage

    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?
    ----

  • I have a question: (Score:4)

    by Skinka (15767) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:07AM (#1072175)
    What's with that small font www.zeldman.com, haven't you read any (web) usability guides?

  • Not to mention putting puny black type on an ugly dim background color making it incredibly difficult to read.

    If this is the future of the web, I better get a new eyeglass prescription.


    --

  • Your site was the inspiration for the site [wildwoman.org] I did for my wife.
    Anyway, how soon do you think it will be until we can use only style sheets on our websites without worrying about graceful degredation?
    This is not to say, by the way, that we shouldn't use tables, as Slashdot and I do. What do you think about Slashdot's layout? Especially the black background with the white table in front?

  • A question (Score:3)

    by jd (1658) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Monday May 15 2000, @06:08AM (#1072181) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:4)

    by jonwiley (79981) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:33AM (#1072182) Homepage
    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 (Score:3)

    by DrSkwid (118965) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:38AM (#1072186) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • A number of posters have pointed out "features" of your site which they don't approve of. Althought it would be interesting, there must be something better you can do during the interview than defend every one of your choices. Since your title page is of a Transitional DOCTYPE (but why not XHTML?), you obviously feel that many of your decisions were the lesser of two evils. Therefore, I ask you thus:

    • What do you think your site (and especially your code) will look like 6 months from now?
    • Will there still be so many compromises?
    • And what needs to happen before it can achieve the most optimistic state?

  • mod this guy to 5 (Score:3)

    by gempabumi (181507) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:45AM (#1072202) Homepage
    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?

  • that this supposed web guru has a big faux pas on his main page - namely "mystery meat navigation" at the top of the page.

    See http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/badnavigation.html for more info.

    --

  • 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

  • any how can you support "some" of css2 and claim 100% standards compliance?

    They aren't claiming 100% compliance with every standard, just the ones they listed, html 4.0, css1, DOM, etc. They specifically state that css2 is not fully supported yet (i think they said it was 40 or 60% supported, and counting).

  • Am I the only one who thinks that the text is not small? I'm running win95 with netscape 4.7 here at work and the font size seems fine to me. Larger than most sites even. What platform/browser are you using?

  • 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.)
  • AFAIK: The internet has already fallen victim to this type of thing. Internet II is an attempt to restore it to it's former information based roots. I'm pretty sure I2 is funded primarily by universities.

    Finkployd
  • So the future of the web is difficult to read, ignores standards, has no clear navigation and is generally irritating and pointless?

    I'm just worried that he's probably right.

  • Your site uses rollovers at almost every opportunity.

    What do they add to the users experience ?
  • Like I said in my other post [slashdot.org] this probably some kind of example of bad web design, so small fonts is something to be expected..

  • Well, the headline calls him a "web design luminary", right? That's among the most luminous pages I've ever seen.

  • 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).
    __
  • 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....

    ----
  • Please, moderate this up through the roof, so that the question is forwarded on to him. (Hint: Not this post, its parent.) IIRC, this is the third Web Design God(tm) that Slashdot has interviewed, and they all seem to get famous for pages like this.

    While I see nothing wrong with pages with annoying javascript and bright colors that hurt my eyes -- there's always the Back button -- I do see something wrong with these people ignoring the standards. Most of his code is pretty clean, so it wouldn't take much work to fix the five or ten errors that the W3C validator returns.

    I'm tired of web designers that think, "Hey, it works in MSIE and Netscape, who cares about the ohters?" This is especially amusing since one of the first links on the page is to the Web Standards Project. *sigh*

    --

  • I imagine that following the post [slashdot.org] by FascDot Killed My Pr, a lot of the posts will have a similar structure. So I'm defining a macro to avoid repetition:

    #define WHY If you're such a hotshot web designer, why

    Using this definition, here is my question:
    WHY does www.webstandards.org [webstandards.org] open links in a new browser window, when this behaviour is inconsistent with the rest of the Web, annoying, and strongly discouraged by the W3C?

  • I don't care about the little graphic at the top of the page that subsidises a web site so that I may have a more cost effective browsing experience.

    What I do object to is when said ad holds my page load hostage for fourty seconds on a cable modem at that.

    A standard I would like to see is a maximum load time for any web page element or something to that effect. Any ideas?

  • Not to flame, but... (Score:5)

    by mr.nobody (113509) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:09AM (#1072244)

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

  • 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 (Score:4)

    by geekpress (171549) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:13AM (#1072247) Homepage

    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

  • 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 (Score:5)

    by Pseudonymus Bosch (3479) on Monday May 15 2000, @07:10AM (#1072255) Homepage
    What would you change, what would you add, what would you remove in Slashdot [slashdot.org]?
    __

  • Alistapart (Score:3)

    by scumdamn (82357) on Monday May 15 2000, @07:35AM (#1072259)
    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 (Score:4)

    by TheTomcat (53158) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:16AM (#1072267) Homepage
    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? (Score:5)

    by Chalst (57653) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:18AM (#1072270) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:5)

    by Proteus (1926) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:19AM (#1072273) Homepage Journal
    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?

    --

  • 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 (Score:3)

    by revscat (35618) on Monday May 15 2000, @06:21AM (#1072295) Homepage Journal
    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.

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