Blog of the week II
"Objects may be closer than they appear" is the cryptic slogan adorning Douglas Bowman's Stopdesign. It's the kind of formulation one can ponder at length as it might refer to programming or it could be a reminder about the need to take care on life's highway.
Bowman is much in the news these days. As Network Design Manager for Terra Lycos, he recently masterminded the CSS/XHTML redesign of Wired News, a site that attracts up to 25 million page views a month. The redesign makes content accessible to all browsers and devices but hides its layout from old browsers that don?t support the W3C standards. Bowman and his team have written an informative rationale explaining why they took these steps and relating the new design to browser history.
In a DevEdge interview with CSS guru Eric Meyer about this huge project, Bowman paid tribute to the advances made in pure standards compliance by the blogging community:
"Wired News isn't the first website to be written in XHTML and to utilize CSS; many weblogs and designers' sites have already converted to these standards."
Some sites, however, still rely on tables for their layout and, embarrassingly, Rainy Day is one of them. Bowman's poses the following question to us laggards:
"Is it important that your documents be backward-compatible with older or specialized browsing environments? And forward-compatible with browser applications of the future? Are you comfortable with the idea that your documents may not look exactly the same in every browser?"
And the answer is, YES. Rainy Day has decided to take up the challenge and we promise a fully standards compliant site in the New Year.
Not content with redesigning Wired News, Bowman has reworked his own site with CSS and XHTML. It looks lovely and renders beautifully. As well as incorporating a blog, Stopdesign presents Bowman's articles, experiments, and thinking surrounding his experience and view of the world as a designer and problem solver.
