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You seem to take a very strong position in what you say and brush away other people's opinions Give me an opinion about web design I haven't heard before and I'll listen interested-ly.
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as well as insulting entire groups of people, in this case web designers. The "ehem morons" thing was part of the title of the blog entry, designed primarily to catch peoples' attentions.
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Delude
Delude \De*lude"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Deluded}; p. pr. & vb.
n. {Deluding}.] [L. deludere, delusum; de- + ludere to play,
make sport of, mock. See {Ludicrous}.]
1. To lead from truth or into error; to mislead the mind or
judgment of; to beguile; to impose on; to dupe; to make a
fool of.
[1913 Webster]
When someone says something enough, s/he has usually convinced him/herself of it. However, when claims are made and people refuse to follow those claims themselves, they are hypocrites. When they believe that they are following their rules, but they clearly are not, they are deluding themselves -- whether intentionally or because they believe what others tell them.
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You say that CSS and XHTML are not supported in older browser and that good design degrades nicely in different situations. That is exactly what CSS applied to XHTML does in older browsers Specifically, the claim that CSS and XHTML make websites
more accessible. CSS is
not supported in older browsers. XML is
not supported in older browsers. SGML is not even supported in older browsers. In XHTML, you can make an image tag like this (and it is completely valid):
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<img src="example" alt="example"></img>
An old browser will display the closing tag because it does not expect it. Most modern browsers will do that too (at least unless the browser realizes it's XML and not HTML).
I dare you to compare a website designed "well" in XML and CSS in a new browser (let's say IE7b or Fx1.5) with it in an old browser (Netscape 3, perhaps) and a textual user agent (like lynx). Most people making the claims that XHTML is better
because it's more accessible and can apply to a wider audience have never looked at an XML document in a browser older than 1 year old.
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When you position yourself as some kind of authority on how to display content on web pages, one would expect an example to uphold this. Yet on your own blog it is extremely difficult to read the text because of the background you have chosen and small font size. I never claimed to be an expert. But I do have experience making websites, dealing with complaints from other web designers, and dealing with other web designers. (As a result, I don't classify myself as a "web designer" if I can help it.)
On a 15" (viewable) IBM monitor from like 1990, at 1280x1024, I can read my own blog perfectly well. If you don't like it, then your tastes are different from mine (surprise!, we're humans). If you can't rea the text then you are a perfect target for accessibility purposes. (The point of accessibility is to try to help as many people as possible to understand the content.) Heavy reliance on stylesheets undermine the browser's accessibility methods.
Compare Fx1.5 w/styles vs. Fx1.5 w/o styles vs. lynx
(Without styles, the text overflowed the 600x200 select target, but not the screen; it did not cause horizontal scrolling.)
Despite the bad design of sitespaces, that degrades pretty nicely. The reason is that it is HTML, using tables for layout (not divs with absolute positioning) and CSS for styling (but no heavy reliance on it). Not my personal choice, but it works.
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I think design is far more important than you do, I think we may agree to disagree on that point. I think you think that you think that design is more important than I think it is (take a few seconds to figure out what that meant -- it's the only way I can write it). But design is very important. If you read a couple of my blog entries, you would realize that. Design is extremely important... but a bad design always outweighs a positive one.
You can wow your visitors with cool effects or you can draw them in with content. Based on the nature of the web, most people should choose the latter. But most choose the former. (Where they are deluding themselves is where they choose the former and claim they choose the latter.)
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I did ask for some feedback on Javascript versus Flash BTW Because you didn't realize what the purpose of this discussion was, I will put it this way: if you design it properly, browser internals (JavaScript) are always better than third party plugin support (Flash). When I say "design it properly", I mean making sure that it works on all target user agents and degrades properly in all others. That means that people with scripting disabled should be able to use your website at least as well as someone with scripting enabled.
The same goes for layout and styling.