Pop Art Blog

The guys over at A List Apart have posted the Survey for People Who Make Websites 2008 . Despite the awkward name, this survey is worth your time if your job has anything whatsoever to do with the web. The results from last year’s survey were really interesting, and now that they’ve refined the questions a bit, this year’s should be even more informative. Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who... Read More...

WebVisions is a Portland-based web conference that I’ve attended twice before . Sadly, due to a crisis at the office, I was only able to attend the first day of sessions this year, which means I missed Andy Baio’s presentation on internet memes and Jeffrey Veen’s keynote . What I did see was good, but not great. In a nutshell, I think that WebVisions is a B-grade conference that’s trying desperately to become an A-grade one. It has moments of greatness, and manages to attract... Read More...

Hooray! The feedback from the web development community convinced the IE development team to change their minds about the default setting for version targeting in IE8 (as I discussed in a previous post ). “In light of the Interoperability Principles, as well as feedback from the community, we’re choosing differently. Now, IE8 will show pages requesting ‘Standards’ mode in IE8’s Standards mode. Developers who want their pages shown using IE8’s ‘IE7 Standards mode’ will... Read More...

Previously on Web Developer Controversies: Aaron Gustafson from the Internet Explorer development team announced that IE8 will use a META tag to kick the engine into standards mode by targeting a specific browser version, something that was previously done by using a valid DOCTYPE. A lot of people, including Jeremy Keith, think this is a bad idea. Here are some of the more interesting points that have been raised in the discussion so far. “If IE8 acts like IE8 by default, then IE8 might break... Read More...

In 1998, Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project to fight for better support of web standards from the browser manufacturers and web developers. It was a success, if for no other reason than it provided a flag to rally behind. This year, the Email Standards Project was founded to rally support for web standards in email clients. The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email... Read More...

"The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging." -- Jeffrey Zeldman, Understanding Web Design Read More...

“I was a baker. You can’t just turn up the oven and expect to take the bread out sooner.” – Eric Danielson, NorthTemple.com QA lead, commenting on the futility of trying to rush some kinds of development . Read More...

For a recent project, I found myself having to convert 60+ product detail pages from the old table-based format to the new XML-based format. I was doing this on my own, and I didn’t relish the thought of manually editing hundreds of tables of product details. For example, here’s an excerpt from one of the old table-based detail lists: <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="268"> <tr> <td class="specheading" colspan="2">Performance<... Read More...

I had to make a slight tweak to a page on a site with a content-management system today. After spending a few minutes unraveling the code, I found out that a simple list of three links was using the following markup, which has clearly been screwed up by the WYSIWYG editor on the site. <p> <span class="TextBold"> NEXT STEPS: <br> <br> </span> <span class="TextPlain"> <span class="TextPlain"> <span class="TextPlain">... Read More...

I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make future updates easier, the Client Services team is afraid the client will come back and say that we should charge them less for updates. For a standards zealot like myself, this... Read More...