sux at webdesign

Halp, how do I learn to write HTML web-pages that are worth a shit? ie. look pretty well the same across browsers, will not do stupid things if you resize the window, etc.  I know how to use CSS to separate content and presentation and all that jazz

Use Flash, it is cross-browser, cross-platform, and the contents scale up and down.

>>1
By not making god-awful web 2.0 shitty layouts. Take a look at /prog/ for example.

>>2
Get out.

>>3
/prog/ is horrible. Shii, in his infinite wisdom, couldn't even get the end of the email field to line up with the text field.

Forget CSS, just use semantic HTML5.
Visual appearance has no relevance whatsoever to your data and is purely a client issue: if some clients want the web to look ``pretty'', they'll create user stylesheets. Most people don't--their fault.  
The onus is on the users who want ``pretty'' web sites to use a suitable client, not on HTML authors to provide extraneous styling files. 
In fact, you might want to look at your server access log: if you write for an audience of intelligent people, you will see that their favorite user-agents will be Mozilla Firefox (which supports user stylesheets through the ``stylish'' extension), Opera (which supports them natively); links, w3-mode, lynx, and w3m (these four browsers do not benefit from CSS--and even if they did, some of those are often used in conjunction with a mail daemon that sends the contents of the page as plain text, for users who prefer not to browse the web from their main computer).

>>5
Visual appearance has no relevance whatsoever to your data
This is patently false. How do you suppose that we're communicating at all? Through letters, which are things, that  have been designed to be seen. Data is fundamentally inseparable from its representation -- data and its representation is the same thing. And in the case of web pages being rendered on the screen, data is purely visual.

A page that has been styled by the user with custom user stylesheets is a different thing entirely from the same page that has been styled by the author. Your suggestion demonstrates a lack of understanding of even the most basic principles of design. Stick to data modeling, >>5 -- let the visual people talk about UI.

>>4
I understand that /prog/ looks like arse, but the notion of fairly plain text layouts is what I was getting at. An example of what not to do would be like what Wikipedia just did to their design.

>>7
Well, I don't want to create incredibly fancy pages, but I want my layouts to look right.  And I don't know how to make my layouts not suck.

>>8
Whatever you do, just please make sure it's still usable in lynx and/or elinks.

Just copy Xarn and you'll be fine.

>>6
You have no idea what the hell you're babbling about. We communicate with letters, sure, but not with pictures of letters. We communicate with a standard method that makes no assumptions about how it will be perceived by the recipient--be it on a computer display, a text-to-speech engine, or a braille terminal.

Of course there is some data that can only legitimately be conveyed through visual means, things like graphs, photographs, illustrations, but proper accessibility practice still requires that an alternative description be provided whenever it's feasible.

Anyway, whether >>1 wishes to convey mostly textual information or mostly pictures, that makes no difference. It is wrong to use CSS to rob the users of the ability to have the information displayed in ways that are meaningful to them.

Just because you think yourself a ``designer'' does not mean I wish to see your information displayed in all the colors of the rainbow and typeset in Comic Sans.

Do you even realize how many people depend on tools like Opera's "User Mode", or Readability <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>; (a very crude Javascript technique) to undo all the damage you ``visual people'' have done to the web?

>>11
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>;
makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around what you're reading
requires an absurdly wide browser to display

>>11
No one here is not acknowledging the value of features like Opera's "User Mode" to customize the browser. Some people like to play with the sharpness setting on their television. Some people are disabled and need a screen-reader -- great! Do those things in any way depreciate the value of a grid system in organizing information? Do they have anything to do with why red is red and blue is blue?

Some people think they are designers. Great! Let them design every website they visit to look the same way, irrespective of content. But that's hardly relevant to the task of a designer, who has a job to do. And that job has everything to do with the data -- because the data is its representation.

>>11,12
Looks like it was designed by a ``visual people''.

I tried designing a web page with no CSS.

It was shit. In fact, it was impossible. You need CSS lest you want to use style="width:600px", which is CSS anyways, you're not fooling anybody.

Having said that, I always try to use CSS as least often as possible, and do so in an easy to understand way.

Sometimes you find yourself working so much on the stylesheet that you end up writing some shitty hacks and making a mess that could have been written much simpler.

I also respect the flow of content.

18 Name: Anonymous 2010-12-06 9:41

^{Back to /b/, ``GNAA Faggot''}