Web Design, Formatting and Coding

XHTML Strict / CSS

The site is written in XHTML Strict with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). All coding done by hand in Notepad with no scripts. (sigh, wish I were on UNIX again!)

Nielsen, usability guru

My master is Jakob Nielsen (LINK), the usability man. Until a few months ago, I would have been proud to have an efficient but plain (ugly?) site, like his Alertbox. When I was creating pages in the last decade of my tech writing career, the only alternative was inefficient and error-prone pages laid out as tables. Since my job was to write up torrents of information, this was not an option for me.

Besides I was writing for hardware support people, who just want the g-damned informations. No patience for cutesy crap that wasn't 100% reliable.

CSS to the rescue

Since coming back to the Web this year, I've found that CSS style sheets are the answer the dilemma of attraction vs efficiency.

I've read through Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web by Hakon Wium Lie (who initially proposed the conscept of the style sheets) and Bert Bos, also with the W3C. This was an excellent introduction. Just the right level for someone like myself, who has used the basic HTML tags for years and is comfortable with programming languages and syntax.

A very useful second book has been Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design. a series of real-world case studies. A breakthrough to see how all the pieces fit together. I was pleased to see that as complicated as the CSS syntax appeared at first, it was relatively simple. There are a few tricks, but the concepts and syntax are straightforward. The big problem, of course, is the spotty support by browsers for CSS. I'm running Internet Explorerer 5.0 which seems to give adequate support for basic style sheets.

Finally, for reference I'm using the new 2004 edition of Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets: the Definitive Guide. At first I was disappointed with the book. It's not a good book to learn from because it doesn't emphasize the big picture or how the language is actually used to construct pages. In the few chapters I've read, the book went into exquisite detail into aspects of the language that were not important to me, such as support for languages that are read from right to left rather than left to right. Well, I figured, I bought the book, so I might as well use it. And in fact, it seems to work well as a reference work. As I work on more difficult problems, the irrelevant detail may turn out to be useful after all.

Probably the most pleasant surprise has been the online community of web designers. I appreciated the Little Boxes tutorial on page layout by Owen Briggs. Even more, I liked his common sense approach to design with CSS: Design Rant and Why Bother?.

Other sites by web designers: Eric Meyer's site Jeffrey Zeldman's site kottke.org

A spectacular site is the CSS Zen Garden, dozens (hundreds?) of tour-de-force web designs using CSS and the same simple HTML web page. Again, much more work than most of us want to put into Web pages, but a real inspiration to learn CSS.

I don't have much talent in graphics, but I do have enough taste to appreciate good designers. So, it's worthwhile to look these sites over. They spend much more effort on their pages than I'm willing to spend.

Finally, Design Eye for the Usability Guy, a roast of poor Jakob Nielsen by some very talented graphic designers. Actually, they mostly seem to agree with his usability principles (hooray!), but they disdain his un-stylish engineer-ish design. The snottiness grates on me, particularly because Nielsen is my hero, but I have to admit that they are right. Efficient, usable web pages CAN be attractive and exciting. And when they present actual web design ideas, I'm sorry Jakob, but I hoisted the white flag and declared myself convinced.

I use XHTML. (See Better Living Through XHTML by Jeffrey Zeldman. I validate it with: WDG HTML Validator. WDG also has a links checker, a CSS validator, and other goodies for web creators.

Finally, the source of much of my information is the design of old books. Loved the 60s books printed with brown ink on rough brownish paper. Liked the Black Sparrow designs, for authors like Charles Bukowski and John Fante. Sucker for old pulp science fiction. And finally, I love the information-dense textbooks of the 19th and early 20th century.

I write the pages and code by hand. I'm used to it, and I like the control I have. I love to understand what is going on. I suppose it would be more "efficient" to use a blogging tool. And they are priced very reasonably ; $0 to under $50. The problem is, that you have to read the manual, figure out the menus, then deal with the inevitable bugs and misunderstandings. I resent spending the energy on dealing with something at several removes from the actual cogs and wheels. It's like automatic transmission.

Troubles with CSS? In my experience, the most likely source of troubles:

So, my troubleshooting strategy is: