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In Part XVIIII of Afternoon Attacks the Web Community with a Cudgel, I pick on designer and writer Curt Cloninger. Curt is the author of the excellent Fresh Styles for Web Designers, the only book on web design I own.

I explained my crusade, albeit not very well, and he had some interesting points to make, not least this:

So why, if I'm doing a design-centric, low-text site, do I care about being standards compliant? The standards aren't made to accomodate the kind of work I'm doing anyway, and they never will be.

I just think of standards as the walls of the room I'm in, whereas of course it's actually the browser implementations of those standards that make up the walls. I disagree though, standards are important to every developer because the web is young and imperfect medium and it's the standards that are going to push it forwards. That's why I'm concerned in many ways, because I see the web being pushed forward with semantic purity, accessibility and usability the only goals, engendering a rather dull, almost Victorian, experience totally in contrast to our "everybody's having sex right now but you!" OTT culture.

One thing I noticed is that Curt mentioned the whole Tim Berners-Lee High Energy Physics thing. Everybody, no matter which team their on, mentions this. Strange. I have been thinking anyway that my idea to start the ALA article out with a bit of history is probably redundant since everybody knows it already. I'm getting less sure about my article day by day. What am I actually saying?

• CSS really great, mainly
• Tables bad, complicated, old, semantically useless
• Web design hard, medium has little control, people (esp. clients) demand faithful reproduction
• Fluidity is one of the keys to success, allows people to do cool things like bump their text sizes or turn off images or resize their browser to 1 pixel square whilst retaining perfect layout
• Overall, tables better at fluidity than CSS
• But tables bad

• Need new thing!

  • Is fluid
  • Predictable
  • Easy to use, painless for as many layouts as possible
  • Good for both coders and DW-monkeys
  • Complimentary to and logically consistent with rest of CSS
  • Similar to tables for reasons of application and implementation
  • Contains advanced syntax for specifying how the layout adapts to different devices or browsers
  • Allows author to specify ways for things to change
  • Allows author to know the frame of reference so they can always do something cool with it

Curt also pointed me in the direction of the Dao of Web Design, a really good ALA article about living on the web, building pages that are flexible and that work for people. I don't think I've been making this clear when I've been hassling people, I certainly didn't make it clear when I wrote to Curt, but this is the big thing for me. Pages have to fit the end browser, in terms of size, font, everything, that's got to be the way it is and that's where CSS is lacking IMHO. Grids aren't great for this, which is why they should be able to reconfigure intelligently. Though working out a syntax to express all this is probably an NP-complete problem. The more I think about this, the more I think I should have been doing this five years ago, when I said I would do something similar for my degree final project and then smoked a bunch of weed instead. This is the kind of thing that would be a cool PhD.

The flux creates, the corporation permeates. In the trans-gender reality, art objects are reproductions of the iterations of the flux -- a flux that uses the corporation as a zeitgeist to enmesh ideas, patterns, and emotions. With the rationalization of the electronic environment, the flux is superseding a point where it will be free from the corporation to consume immersions into the parameters of the delphic reality. Work of Meta-Art in the Age of Generative Reproduction contains 10 minimal flash engines (also refered to as "AI modules") that enable the user to make ridiculous audio/visual compositions.

measuring chains, constructing realities
putting into place forms
a matrix of illusion and disillusion
a strange attracting force
so that a seduced reality will be able to spontaneously feed on it

Yamamoto Brown's work investigates the nuances of surveilance cameras through the use of stopframe motion and close-ups which emphasize the Generative nature of digital media. Brown explores abstract and overwhelming scenery as motifs to describe the idea of hyper-real reality. Using irresistable loops, vectors, and allegorical images as patterns, Brown creates meditative environments which suggest the expansion of space...

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/u[0]{)]|]]-] -------------/u/u!@#$%^~!@#$%^&*()) __++_)(*&^%$--------/u/u!@#$%^~!@#$ %^&*())__++_)(*&^%$--------/u/u!@#$ %^~!@#$%^&*())__+, etc., etc.

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Courtesy of playdamage.org.

For my upcoming ALA article (man, saying that feels good, even if it doesn't get published), I would like to be able to draw on the feelings of major designers. To this end I'm thinking about sending a simple questionnaire to the web teams responsible for a number of high profile sites.

I'm not sure what the questions will be, but here's some rough ideas:

1. Why do you use appropriate layout system to layout xyz.com?
2. if the page is tables Why don't you use CSS for layout? CSS is very powerful. Is it because you don't know about CSS, don't know how to recreate your layout in CSS or some other reason? else if the page is CSS Why don't you use tables? They're tried and trusted
3. Why is design important for your site? may get the answer "because everybody else has it" which would be fruitless
4. If you could change one thing about HTML+CSS to make it a little easier to do your job, what would that be?
5. Do the designers at your location design pages bottom-up by writing code or top-down, using tools such as Illustrator, Freehand, Photoshop or the Gimp?

The other thing to think about is mentioning my ideas. If I say I want to put the grids back into web design, will that influence the answers? Probably. Do I want this? Not sure, I wouldn't mind feedback on my ideas from the people running the top sites on the net.

The big new feature in iTunes 4 is Music Store. I've already read one person who said "finally somebody has got it right". I'm inclined to agree. You have a bunch of browseable pages leading you to playlists of purchaseable tracks. They look just like other iTunes playlists, you can even double click the tracks to hear a sample. You can access music from any label and you buy songs for 99¢. It doesn't work outside the US yet and the selection currently looks bad. I searched for Aphex then Bambaataa and got nothing before giving up and going back to the zzzone.

Micropayments. Fantastic. I've got lots of albums where I'm missing a track or two and I've got lots of artist collections where I'm missing the odd release. I'll pay about 60p to get that missing track, oh God I will, I'm a major tidier. If you've heard a DJ drop a tune you really like, why spend weeks waiting for it to arrive on SoulSeek or Kazaa when you can just hit a button and let your card do the talking and not much talking at that? I think this is the next stage for music sales, I think that everybody involved here is going to make money. I'm sad that MP3 didn't quite destroy the music industry. Hopefully it will someday.

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Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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