Before I Forget
Published 18 years, 3 months pastAt the risk of being a bit backward-looking, on 21 December 2005 I was quoted in the article “Year in Review: CSS, Standards, Microformats and Flash“. (And I wasn’t even the one who talked about microformats, Jon!) This was the second half of a year-end review by Stephen Bryant; part one, “The Highs and Lows of Web Design in 2005“, is also online and quotes many familiar names. I was going to blog both at the time, and, well… I forgot.
For historical purposes, here’s the whole block of text from which I was quoted, in response to the question “Generally speaking, did you see much progression in the adoption of Web standards this year? In CSS use? Can you give some specific site examples?”:
As in previous years, 2005 saw standards adopted more slowly than I’d have liked, but faster than in previous years. I think this was the year when it became self-evident that standards-oriented design is the way to go. I can’t remember the last time I had to defend the practice, and whenever that was, it wasn’t in 2005. At this point, it’s basically all over but the training. I think the biggest gap now is between the people who want to go standards-oriented, and their ability to do so. That’s not an easy gap to bridge, but I think we’ll get there.
I mean, it’s the point now that desktop applications are using XHTML and CSS to drive their layout. Just recently I discovered that Adium, a multi-service chat client for OS X, uses XHTML+CSS for its chat windows. [E]very chat session in Adium is just a single XHTML document that’s dynamically updated. Which means that you can define your own markup and CSS to create your own chat window theme. It’s amazingly slick and powerful, and some of the themes are just gorgeous. There are other programs doing similar things, and I expect the trend to continue.
The new-in-2005 CSS-driven sites that immediately come to mind: Apple, Slashdot, Turner Broadcasting, AlterNet, McAfee… and I’m sure there were hundreds of others I missed.
Hopefully this won’t lose me the bonus points Jeremy awarded me. C’mon, man—at least I didn’t post my answer to the question “Best books, blogs, design? Best CSS layout?”!
Comments (5)
Apple went web standards this year?
I’ll let you off… just because you “conveniently” posted this in 2006, rather than at the tail-end of 2005. ;-)
I’m wondering the same thing as Small Paul… isn’t it a stretch to call their site “css-driven”?
Regarding Apple: Less of stretch than to call it not CSS-driven, especially compared to the way their site used to be done. The home page wobbles between table and non-table layout, but most if not all of their new pages use little to no tables—and where tables occur, they’re usually actual data tables. (Modulo the page-topping tabs, which they just can’t seem to get out of that table markup. Oh well; they’ll make that leap, and my prediction is that they’ll probably do it relatively soon.)
Take my word for it: here in .pt, we still have IE-only sites; some in e-government, others big media companies. And some work poorly even at that.
Disappointing for me; I actually did cross-browser testing of table-based layouts; seems like an era ago.