From the W3C news archive for 2 July 2009:

XHTML 2 Working Group Expected to Stop Work End of 2009, W3C to Increase Resources on HTML 5

2009-07-02: Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009, the charter will not be renewed. By doing so, and by increasing resources in the Working Group, W3C hopes to accelerate the progress of HTML 5 and clarify W3C’s position regarding the future of HTML. A FAQ answers questions about the future of deliverables of the XHTML 2 Working Group, and the status of various discussions related to HTML. Learn more about the HTML Activity. (Permalink)

Tags: W3C, XML, XHTML, HTML, HTML5, WTF

Most web design and development projects turn into clusterfucks. The problem is not unique to web-based client services. Advertising projects, graphic design jobs, architecture assignments, filmmaking, and pretty much every other professional creative service usually begins with smart, talented people shaking hands across a table, and ends in finger-pointing and regret—like a Country & Western love song.

Great work cannot emerge from such environments. Not even good work can crawl from that wreckage. If a fine portfolio, a delightful career, and the satisfaction of earning your bread by providing a genuine service are to be had, you must first learn to manage your clients and colleagues.

Managing your way out of a paper bag

Although I teach this skill, I confess I am not nearly as good at it as I should be. The trick to great projects, I have found, is (a.) landing clients with whom you are sympatico, and who understand language, time, and money the same way you do, and (b.) assembling teams you don’t have to manage, because everyone instinctively knows what to do. I have been lucky at those two things, and thus poor at coping when a design job very occasionally lights its own genitals on fire and leaps into a bucket of oil.

For those who have no control over which clients and projects come to them, there is still hope, because everyone on the web (not just professional designers and developers) has the ability to produce meaningful content, and every designer and developer additionally has the power to create products and services. As your own client, working alone, or with a carefully hand-picked team, you can produce great things. If you suck at management, you’ll have problems, but not the kind of problems that create mediocre websites while emptying your company’s bank account and draining all the joy and color out of life.

Producing a well-edited zine or a useful and skillfully designed web application may produce income. It will almost certainly generate job satisfaction. And once it finds the right audience, it should yield more sympathetic clients, resulting in fewer clusterfucks, and a greater ability to get on the phone and straighten out a mess if you still occasionally fumble as a manager.

Tags: business, webdesign, project management

Although it is never popular, never the dominant trend, rarely wins design awards, and almost never earns acclaim from designers, design stripped down to its essentials is always a good idea, and especially on the web, where every byte counts. We salute the old and new practitioners of minimalist web design, and solicit your thoughts on pioneers or present practitioners who combine a minimalist aesthetic with significant design chops.

• 37signals home page, 27 November 1999
• 37signals detail page (first signal), 27 November 1999
• Kottke.org, home of fine hypertext products, 9 March 2000
• Kottke.org, home of fine hypertext products today
• Drudge Report, 10 December 1997
• Drudge Retort
• cardigan.com by Dean Allen (abandoned 2001)
• Wilson Miner
• Subtraction.com by Khoi Vinh
• WordPress Neutica theme designed by Allan Cole (Hat tip: Oliver Lorton)

Tags: design, webdesign, minimalism, history, web design history

Hundreds of millions use Microsoft Internet Explorer to access the web, and Microsoft Outlook to send and receive email. As everyone reading this knows, the good news is that in IE8, Microsoft has released a browser that supports web standards at a high level. The shockingly bad news is that Microsoft is still using the Word rendering engine to display HTML email in Outlook 2010.

What does this mean for web designers, developers, and users? In the words of the “Let’s Fix It” project created by the Email Standards Project, Campaign Monitor, and Newism, it means exactly this:

[F]or the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more. Want proof? Here’s the same email in Outlook 2000 & 2010.

It’s difficult to believe that in 2009, after diligently improving standards support in IE7 and now IE8, Microsoft would force email designers to use nonsemantic table layout techniques that fractured the web, squandered bandwidth, and made a joke of accessibility back in the 1990s.

Accounting for stupidity

For a company that claims to believe in innovation and standards, and has spent five years redeeming itself in the web standards community, the decision to use the non-standards-compliant, decades-old Word rendering engine in the mail program that accompanies its shiny standards-compliant browser makes no sense from any angle. It’s not good for users, not good for business, not good for designers. It’s not logical, not on-brand, and the very opposite of a PR win.

Rumor has it that Microsoft chose the Word rendering engine because its Outlook division “couldn’t afford” to pay its browser division for IE8. And by “couldn’t afford” I don’t mean Microsoft has no money; I mean someone at this fabulously wealthy corporation must have neglected to budget for an internal cost. Big companies love these fictions where one part of the company “pays” another, and accountants love this stuff as well, for reasons that make Jesus cry out anew.

But if the rumor’s right, and if the Outlook division couldn’t afford to license the IE8 rendering engine, there are two very simple solutions: use Webkit or Gecko. They’re both free, and they both kick ass.

Why it matters

You may hope that this bone-headed decision will push millions of people into the warm embrace of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but it probably won’t. Most people, especially most working people, don’t have a choice about their operating system or browser. Ditto their corporate email platform.

Likewise, most web designers, whether in-house, agency, or freelance, are perpetually called upon to create HTML emails for opt-in customers. As Outlook’s Word rendering engine doesn’t support the most basic CSS layout tools such as float, designers cannot use our hard-won standards-based layout tools in the creation of these mails—unless they and their employers are willing to send broken messages to tens millions of Outlook users. No employer, of course, would sanction such a strategy. And this is precisely how self-serving decisions by Microsoft profoundly retard the adoption of standards on the web. Even when one Microsoft division has embraced standards, actions by another division ensure that millions of customers will have substandard experiences and hundreds of thousands of developers still won’t get the message that our medium has standards which can be used today.

So it’s up to us, the community, to let Microsoft know how we feel.

Participate in the Outlook’s Broken project. All it takes is a tweet.

Tags: browsers, bugs, IE8, outlook, microsoft, iranelection

• Introduction to RDFa: Learn how semantic features normally confined to the head of an HTML document can be used to add semantic richness to the elements of the body. Part One of a two-part primer.
• Visual Decision Making: If it takes only 50 milliseconds for people to form an aesthetic opinion of your site’s credibility and trustworthiness, are designers who create visually compelling sites wasting time and treasure on indulgences?

Schools that teach web design struggle to keep pace with our industry, and those just starting their curricula often set off in the wrong direction because the breadth and depth of our medium can be daunting. The WaSP InterAct curriculum project seeks to ease the challenges schools around the world face as they prepare their students for careers on the Web. … Its courses are divided into six learning tracks that provide students with a well rounded foundation in the many facets of the web design craft.

The group offers its resources to all who need them (to reuse adapt), and it seeks your content and ideas.

Tags: design, data, webdesign, webstandards, education, curriculum, WaSP, webstandards.org

Mr Marcotte is a web designer/developer who “works for Airbag Industries as a Senior Designer, swears profusely on Twitter, and is getting married to an incredible lady.” He is also a technical editor and contributing author to A List Apart, and the co-author of several fine books about the intersection between great code and fine design. Then there’s the fact that I dig him. I dig the hell out of him. I love him like a younger, sweeter, funnier brother.

That’s important because I don’t add a co-author to any book, let alone this book, lightly. In asking Ethan to help me bring the awesome to this substantially revised and rewritten edition, I chose not only on the basis of expertise and writing ability, but also on sheer karma.

In his new role, Ethan joins a SuperFriends™ line-up including technical editor Aaron Gustafson (Twitter), another honey of a guy, and truly one of the smartest, most innovative, and most knowledgeable voices in web standards, and editor Erin Kissane (Twitter), whose mastery of the subtlest details of voice consistency alone makes her the finest editor I have ever been blessed to work with. Behind it all, there’s Michael Nolan (Twitter), New Riders’ sagely seasoned acquisitions editor and a designer and author himself, who first took a chance on me as an author back in nineteen ninety humph.

Designing With Web Standards, 3rd Edition is coming this year to a bookstore near you. I thank my brilliant crew for making it possible. Onward!

Tags: EthanMarcotte, beep, unstoppablerobotninja, airbag, alistapart, CSS, design, webstandards, webdesign, designingwithwebstandards, DWWS, 3rdedition, DWWS3e, writer, writers, authors

Mainly, the redesign is content focused. After so many years as a web designer, and after creative directing so many influential projects, I naturally considered doing a wide, three-column, ultra-modern design—something cool, detached, polished, and glowing with rich media and fancy-pants sliding-drawer JavaScript effects. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things. In the right circumstances, those things can rock hard. But this site is mainly about my writing. So I crafted a simple look that encourages reading and hearkens back to this site’s early years.

Read more about it here, here, there, and elsewhere. (Don’t freak out; these old posts are now in the new layout, adding a layer of surrealism to the experience, since you’re looking at a blog post in the finished new look that links to and talks about cruddy early versions of that same look.)

If orange hurts you, there’s a style switcher in the footer that will remember your preference for an off-white background. You’re welcome.

WordPress implementation by Noel Jackson.

Rotation script by Mark Huot.

Thanks, fellas! And thanks to all readers who critiqued the public beta.

Tags: zeldman, zeldman.com, redesign, redesigns, webdesign, design

Tags: A List Apart, alistapart, database, design, team, building, leading, michael lopp, lyle mullican, webdesign, webdevelopment, development

html5 gallery has two primary aims, the first is to showcase sites that use html5 for markup, so that we can see how people have interpret[t]ed the specification and how they’ve implemented it. This leads me on to the secondary aim which is to help people learn about html5 and how it should be used and how to implement it.

I’m hoping that a side effect of this is that browser developers will see how many people are implementing html5 and add more support for it in their rendering engines so that we don’t have to add display:block; to elements where not required and we don’t have to rely on javscript to create elements.

You can follow @htmlgallery to get updates when new sites are added to the gallery.

Richard Clark, a front end designer based in Manchester, UK, created and maintains the site. You can follow Richard on Twitter.

One of the most common descriptive notes people have to write using text when they post links or images to blogs, comments or anywhere in HTML is to say “this link is not safe for work” or simply “NSFW”. By adding the <NSFW> tag, this could be made much simpler and standardized. Browsers could then have an option to automatically hide all <NSFW> content. A tag is preferred to an attribute since it could then also be used around content and not just links.

Examples:
<nsfw><a href=”http://www.example.com”>Pics here!</a></nsfw>
<nsfw><img src=”badkitten.jpg”></nsfw>

(Via Bruce Lawson)

Drew McLellan of The Web Standards Project thinks it’s a nice idea that won’t work:

@brucel we looked into #nsfw in microformats. It’s an unworkable minefield. #

it’s used when linking to something that you might want to save until you get home. e.g. http://ampleboobies.info (NSFW) #

So a browser could conceivably be configured not to follow links or display content tagged nsfw. Sounds a good idea, but unworkable. #

The use of tags (rather than CSS and JavaScript) to hide or show content is an intriguing and controversial aspect of HTML 5. It’s intriguing because using a standard tag—instead of writing custom CSS and JavaScript that someone else may someday have to maintain—potentially simplifies web development and maintenance, bringing advanced techniques of content presentation to more sites for less money. It’s controversial because it sticks presentation and behavior back in markup, after we all just spent a decade separating site structure and semantics from behavior and presentation.

We’re going to be following these developments and trying to make buzzword-free sense of them for you.

Tags: standards, webstandards, HTML, HTML5, tags, NSFW, W3C

I confirmed this by installing smcFanControl and watching my Mac get hotter and hotter as it tried to complete a SuperDuper backup. Disk Utility confirmed nothing was wrong with the attached drive. Swapping cables proved a faulty cable was not to blame for previous failed backups. Maddeningly, the backup got within 4GB of completion before locking up due to the overheating of my iMac.

Not every iMac or MacBook is affected. It probably varies by factory run and by model. (My MacBook Pro, for instance, is fine.) Third-party stuff and Migration vs. Tabula Rasa System Install seems to have no bearing on whether or not your Mac will choke on the update.

Since even running smcFanControl at settings recommended by Robert Black and others doesn’t cool the iMac enough to finish a backup or verify the quality of the attached drives, it may not make sense to replace my external hard drives (as new drives will likely also fail as the iMac overheats during backup).

With smcFanControl in place, I can use my iMacs but not back them up.

Apple needs to release an update that fixes the hardware problems this one created.

(And someone else needs to install it before I do.)

Tags: OSX10.5.7, bugs, Apple, Macintosh, update

Fellow Mac users, let’s see if we can isolate the triggers of the OS X 10.5.7 blues. If we learn the cause, others may know whether it’s safe for them to update, and we may provide Apple’s engineers with a clue on how to fix the problem in a subsequent update.

Theory 1: Migration Assistant

My affected iMacs have systems that were migrated. That is, when I bought the machines in December 2007, after running them for a while as-is to ensure that they worked properly, I ran Migration Assistant to bring over applications, preferences, network settings, and so on from my previous work machine (a non-Intel white powerbook).

Theory: Possibly OS X 10.5.7 update becomes unstable in the presence of a leftover something migrated from an older system.

Test: If you’re suffering from the 10.5.7 blues, did you run Migration Assistant on the afflicted machine? Did you migrate from a non-Intel machine?

Theory 2: Third-Party Stuff

When something goes wrong with a Macintosh update, a third-party add-on is often the trigger. Here are the add-ons on my sufferin’ iMacs:

• Linotype FontExplorer X Version 1.2.3. (The last free version.)
• Default Folder X Version 4.1
• DragThing Version 5.9.3
• Dropbox
• MenuCalendarClock iCal (removed!)
• iLike iTunes music plug-in (removed!)

Items marked “removed!” were my initial suspects. After the update, iTunes froze on sync. I reckoned the iLike plug-in was to blame, and after removing it, was able to sync again for a while.

Then the Mac froze during an iCal sync, so I removed MenuCalendarClock.

But removing these little guys didn’t fix anything. Soon enough, even without these add-ons, the Macs were freezing during iTunes sync and during MobileMe iCal sync. Eventually they froze on any app, doing anything. (Only to inexplicably resume normal operation again for hours at a time. But enough of this.)

And you? If your Mac is misbehaving after running OS X 10.5.7 update, are any of these add-ons on the machine?

Tags: OSX, bugs, OSX10.5.7, 10.5.7, apple, software, updates

Apple’s OS X 10.5.7 update is dangerously unpredictable. Although many Mac users have updated without incident, many others have had nothing but trouble. Friends’ problems range from dead hard drives to frazzled MacBooks to freezes and beyond. In my case, the update destabilized both my home and office iMacs and the backup drives attached to them. Symptoms include:

• Multiple applications freeze inexplicably. Force-quitting does not work. The only way to move forward is to hold the power button for several seconds until the machine is forced to shut down.
• The Finder quits mysteriously and cannot restart.
• In normal mode, restarts time out (forcing you to hold the power button and pray no data was damaged or lost).
• In safe mode, restarts freeze (forcing you to hold the power button and pray no data was damaged or lost).
• The machines cannot communicate reliably with attached hard drives. (Backups fail in mid-activity. Attached hard drives disconnect themselves. Attached hard drives cannot be unmounted for repairs. And so on.)
• Lower-case letters replace capital letters when pasting copied text from one application to another. Yes, really.

These problems affected two iMacs and three connected hard drives by various manufacturers in two locations on separate networks. The only connecting thread is the OS X update.

Friends and readers have recommended various familiar techniques to “fix” the problem, but none of them have worked for me. The proposed fixes include:

Shut down everything. Disconnect printers, remove drives, iPod docks, and so on, from the iMac. Restart the iMac.

If a remote device or connection were at fault, this would reveal it. No such luck.

Restart in single Mode (hold down Control-S), type “fsck – fy” at the command line, and type “reboot” after repairs.

This is readily doable, but fixes nothing. There is nothing to repair. The computer in Single Mode indicates that the hard drive is fine.

Reboot from the install disks, run Disk Utility, and repair the internal hard drive.

Same deal: there is nothing to repair. The internal hard drive is fine, according to Disk Utility.

Run Disk Utility on attached back-up drives, and hit “Repair” until the attached drives are fixed.

There is nothing to repair on attached back-up drives, either (even though they fail). When it isn’t failing to operate because “it is impossible to unmount the drive,” Disk Utility reports that attached back-up drives are fully operational. Although Disk Utility finds nothing wrong with attached drives, they fail mid-way through back-up; thus it is impossible to back up work or home Macs, making it likely that I will lose work or data. Symptoms affect all attached drives, regardless of manufacturer and model.

Restart in Safe Mode and run the Combination Installer.

I’ve done that, too; it does not fix the problem. The update is either unstable in itself, or incompatible with the Mac’s own hardware (or with some very common third-party system addition).

And lots more stuff.

Twitter and the Apple forums contain the complaints of users whose computers have gone blooey after installing the update. Apple, of course, does not respond to these complaints.

At the moment, my options are:

1. Put up with the freezes and quitting and the inability to back up my work, and trust that Apple will issue a system update soon that returns stability to my machines, and that I won’t lose work or data in the meantime. Or…
2. Reinstall the original operating system from any installation disk. Run the combo updater. Test for two days to see if the system operates. Connect printers and backup drives. Test for two more days to see if all is well. Then painstakingly reinstall Photoshop, Illustrator, Office, and so on.

With one option, I’m continually frustrated and risk losing my work. With the other option, I lose four or five days reinstalling and testing operating systems, updates, and software.

I choose Apple’s products because they are elegant in every aspect of their design—especially the design of the user experience. Screw-ups like this update are the antithesis of the normal Apple user experience. While no one deliberately decided to make an unusable update, and while probably no one will die as a result, it’s still a very frustrating situation.

SuperDuper runs on Intel and Power PC Macs, and is compatible with Time Machine under Leopard. Download and use it forever for free, or buy for US $27.95 to unlock scheduling and Smart Update. (Smart Update copies only the data that has changed since your last backup, enabling you to backup your hard drive in minutes instead of hours. Which means you’ll actually get into the habit of running the backup program every day. Which means you’ll never lose your work. Best $27.95 you’ll ever spend.)

Update Jun 3, 2009

Ironically enough, this morning, a routine backup failed. SuperDuper immediately presented me with a simple “report the problem” form that included a log of everything that had happened on my system. I filled out the form and hit SEND. Within 30 minutes, I had an email from Shirt Pocket Support diagnosing the problem:

It looks like your destination volume failed during the backup. Here’s some stuff from your system log that shows the error in progress: [etc.]

There were also simple instructions on how to test (and possibly fix) my backup drive.

There was even a note about some scripting additions carried over via migration that were likely no longer working on my Intel Mac.

This is unbelievable service.

To anyone who thinks this is a paid ad, don’t be silly (or insulting). I really love this product and this company. You will, too.

Tags: superduper, backup, program, mac, macintosh, osx, os x, apple