5by5 - The Web Ahead #33: Back to Basics with Jen Robbins
The web at it’s basics is HTML and CSS. If you want to learn these fundamentals, where do you start? Jen Robbins joins Jen Simmons to lay out a road map.
Jennifer Robbins has been a Web designer since 1993. She designed the web’s first commercial site, O’Reilly’s Global Network Navigator (GNN).
The Web Behind: Episode One with John Allsopp
John Allsopp joins Eric Meyer and Jen Simmons for this first episode in our “web behind” series — a look back at where the web came from and the people who created it. They talk about early web design tools, community groups that shaped the web, thinkers from the mid-20th century who shaped ideas about hypertext, and much more.
Hailing from Sydney, Australia, John Allsopp by himself has seen and done more on the web than most web teams put together. First encountering the web in the early 1990s, he built one of the very first CSS tools, Style Master, and a number of other web development tools; published a wealth of information like support charts and free courses; wrote the deeply insightful and far-seeing article “A Dao of Web Design”; influenced the course of the Web Standards Project; and founded a successful international conference series that continues to this day.
This week we were joined by Jeremy Keith, long time super genius. Jeremy works at Clearleft in what he dubs the Research & Development arm. He built Huffduffer, wrote HTML5 for Web Designers (amongst other books), and is an all around swell chap from Brighton, UK. We talk about (roughly in order):
News’n’Links’n’Drama
This week we were joined by Ethan Marcotte, our chauffeur into the brave new world of responsive web design. We’ve been getting a good amount of questions about RWD, so we’ve saved the best ones up for a special espisode from the man himself. We talk about (roughly in order):
Hot Links:
StyleDocco (http://jacobrask.github.com/styledocco/)
Adobe Shadow (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/shadow/)
SenchaTouch 2 (http://www.sencha.com/blog/announcing-sencha-touch-2/)
The Non-Breaking Space Show Crossover (http://nonbreakingspace.tv/shoptalk-crossover-with-chris-coyier-and-dave-rupert/)
The Industry Podcast (http://theindustry.cc/2012/03/06/2-responsive-sass-awkward-hugs/)
Q&A:
>What is responsive design?
>When shouldn’t you use responsive design?
>Using image sprites with responsive design?
>Scaling images in responsive design
>Responsive display advertising
>Making the jQuery plugin DataTables responsive
>Grid systems to help the transition into responsive design
>Is hiding inline images good enough to prevent them from loading?
>Embedded tweets in responsive design
>Masonry style layouts
Note: Dear Audiophiles, sorry about the choppy recording. Will work on it.
This week we were joined by Nicole Sullivan, a long time web veteran, originator of OOCSS, CSS lint, and tons more. Nicole is definitely a thought leader in the modern web development world who is often ahead of us all. We’ve watched OOCSS start out as this abstract and highly criticized concept turn into a pretty commonplace practice on large sites. We talk about (roughly in order):
News’n’Links’n’Drama:
>Matt Wilcox on The Responsive Images Problem
>IE 7 Tax – Company literally charging 6.8% more for products they sell online if browser is IE 7.
Q & A:
>Isn’t OOCSS just moving CSS bloat into HTML bloat?
>Is there going to be a book on OOCSS?
>Recognizing when many elements have the same classes, and making a new class that @extends the old ones.
>Can you use the body element like you would a page-wrapping div?
>What tools to we suggest for validation in the modern world, especially as part of a workflow?
>How does SMACSS compare/contrast to OOCSS?
>When do you call yourself a professional designer or developer?
>How about universally setting elements to position: relative;
Carl and Richard talk to Emily Lewis about HTML5, CSS3, Microformats, and general web development topics. Emily calls herself a ‘standardista’ and demonstrates that in the conversation, talking about the advantage of using schemas to identify different types of data in your web pages. Could this be the return of XML schemas in a way that makes sense?
Some of the most important design decisions happen in code. In 2009, I gave a talk at the Build conference in Belfast with what I thought was a fairly uncontroversial premise: web designers should write code. Since then, the subject has sparked more than a few debates, including a particular heated pile-on when Elliot Jay Stocks tweeted that he was "shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse." In a recent interview, Jonathan Ive said "It’s very hard to learn about materials academically, by reading about them or watching videos about them; the only way you truly understand a material is by making things with it." He’s talking about product design, but the principle is just as relevant to the Web (if not more so). "The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material—the material informs the form…. Because when an object’s materials, the materials’ processes and the form are all perfectly aligned…. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way." As our industry grows and roles get more specialized, it’s possible to become a "web designer" without more than a cursory understanding of the fundamental building materials of the Web: the code. Is this just the price of progress? Are the days of the web craftsman soon to be in the past? Or is a hybrid approach to web design and development something worth preserve?
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