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Tim Berners-Lee Still Knows What’s Best For The Web

Sometimes you have to wonder what it’s like to be Tim Berners-Lee. To have coded out some basic piece of Internet technology that effectively made the other pieces come together, and then to see your baby become the new media for the whole  world and all of the effects it has. Is it working out the way he expected it to? Does he ever feel like Prometheus, perhaps having given us fire too soon?

Sir Tim recently gave a talk at the Nokia conference, cautioning us once again about the dangers of leaving privacy up to corporations and governments, and also about the importance of net neutrality.

Throughout the developed world we see the continued erosion of the idea that the web is a free zone for everyone. It’s starting to become a matter of where you live, what laws control the content, and from whom you buy access. Tim Berners-Lee, like Richard Stallman (founder of GNU), is one of our “Jiminy Crickets,” voices that can do little but talk, and so are out there quietly being the conscience of the tech world. The distressing thing is, their voices grow fainter as time goes on, and few are listening or taking up their cause. What that may spell for the continued level playing field of the web business market is anybody’s guess.

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Why It's Time For Everybody To Start Hyping HTML5

Why It’s Time For Everybody To Start Hyping HTML5

We work in the web development industry, and so we love our shiny new stuff! Don’t we? We love our chrome-plated glowy neon high-tech toys, because they make us feel like the hero in a Tron movie.

web-developmentOhhh, it’s exhausting keeping that up. But anyway, as painful as it will be to live through, we’re starting to see lots of enthusiastic hype for HTML5, which means that it will come to pass. It works this way because the life-cycle of all new web tech runs like this:

  • Initial spec. Somebody like Tim Berners-Lee or Paul Graham makes a blog post about it; everybody laughs.
  • First implementation. Some bright little start-up implements it before its time and it falls over. All the big companies sniff over it and turn their nose up at it.
  • A handful of bright bloggers keep yammering about it and why we should give it a chance.

(more…)

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
The Web Designer's Most Dreaded Fonts

The Web Designer’s Most Dreaded Fonts

Why do web designers get so worked up over fonts? A decision on whether to use one font or another for a logo may embroil an entire office, waging cubicle-to-cubicle warfare (imagine stapler-cannons, binder-clip mortars, and waste-paper-basket helmets here) that shoots down an entire day’s productivity. A non-designer will look on all this and wonder what on earth gets into people.

Let’s try to explain the rationale behind the most-dreaded fonts and why designers feel that way. On top of all these, the thing that makes a font the least popular is when it’s been overused.

  • banned-rubber-stamp-graphicComic Sans – The thing is, this font was only intended as a joke/ novelty font. Think “party invitations.” Instead, a whole generation of novice web users latched onto this font for dear life and use it for everything, be it funeral notices, dear John letters, or results coming back from an AIDS test. There are tombstones chiseled in Comic-Sans out there.
  • Vivaldi – If Comic Sans is in trouble for people who don’t take themselves seriously enough, Vivaldi is the font for people who take themselves too seriously. Vivaldi is appropriate for snooty French restaurants and symphony programs. Anything else just makes it scream “pretentious snob!”

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Tips For Web Designers To Reduce Stress

Tips For Web Designers To Reduce Stress

Hey, it’s refreshing to see somebody acknowledge that web workers have stress, isn’t it? Most of the time our acquaintances will be all, “What are you complaining about, all you do is sit around and type all day?” So this list of tips for reducing the stress of web work really hits home.

Some particularly strong points that need emphasizing here:

5005Exercise One of the things they don’t warn you about is that a life of sitting in a chair staring at a computer screen will make you fat. There’s no way around this; it doesn’t matter what you eat, if you never burn calories, you will gain weight. So yes, taking a walk will also help burn some pounds off your chunky waistline. (more…)

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Seven Outdated Web Design Concepts

Seven Outdated Web Design Concepts

I say, isn’t it about time you updated that website you had your nephew build for you back in 1998? Outdated web pages look older every year, and now that the World Wide Web is pushing on into the 2010s, even some of the hot trends of the 2000s are beginning to show their age.

If your website’s outdated, it says bad things about you. Visitors might think you must have gone out of business, have no taste, only care about an older audience, or are just too technically incompetent to keep your website up to date. If your website is sporting any of these long-gone elements, perhaps it’s time to think about an update just to keep up with the passing decades.

Vectors_Art1. Photoshop design / Image slicing – This used to be the default method of design, even by the pro shops. But not only is slicing an image to fit into tables now outdated, but the whole “design it in Photoshop” thing is an anachronism. Modern-day sites, relying more on CSS than tables, fare far better if laid out in Fireworks, Illustrator, or Inkscape.

2. Background music / autoplaying media – Probably there are no .MIDI sound files playing any more (we hope! those got old even in 1998!), but today’s equivalent is media such as video or Flash ad content that starts playing sound as soon as the visitor arrives. At least let the visitor mouse over the element or give them a way to pause it. (more…)

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Web Designers Bandy About NoSQL

Web Designers Bandy About NoSQL, Everyone Else Baffled

The least sexy word in the English language is “database.” You could just have the wildest party in the world happening, and run in and yell “database!” and it would take the fizz out of the champagne, make the DJ pack up his rig and go home, stop the dancing cold, and make everybody run away. Databases are the exact point where a CS major quits studying to be a web developer and decides to become a web designer instead. It’s still used in Catholic school to punish unruly students.

SQLSo everybody’s supposed to be very excited about this new NoSQL thing. Now we have to pretend to be excited too. We also have to pretend to understand what NoSQL is all about. Yes, horizontal scaling!

And we’ll also nod along with the important-sounding acronym ACID, which stands for “A Completely Important-sounding Designation,” and something about what databases should do. Of course, all this is drawing fresh ink because Oracle bought out Sun, and… wait a minute, what does Oracle make again?

Join us next time for the thrilling conclusion, when the backlash movement “YesSQL” makes an even more obscure ripple of hype!

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
What Is Flash?

Web Design – What Is Flash?

Apple says Adobe is working to sabotage HTML5. Adobe says HTML5 is no threat to Flash. Everybody’s watching the fight, and we love the six-fingered tattooed fist in the image, guys!

While we’re all bickering, could we help by pointing out what Flash is?

folder-adobe-flashIn the first place, Flash is not an Adobe innovation. Flash was originally developed in 1992 by a company called Macromedia, when it created a browser plug-in originally for Netscape Navigator. Life went on this way for 13 years, all the way up until Adobe bought out Macromedia in 2005, in a hostile takeover which also acquired Dreamweaver. Since 2005, Flash has gone from being a relatively controversy-free plug-in to being a hotbed of drama and turmoil. (more…)

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Web Audience Age Demographics

Web Designers – Know the Web Audience – Age Demographics

Every web designer should at least save a copy of this chart listing social media use by age. It’s a gold mine of information in a small image. Charting age brackets for young teens, young adults, Generation Y, Generation X, Baby Boomers, Older Boomers, and Seniors, it shows who’s using the features of the modern web, from creators to spectators.

Obviously, you can see the age range from 12 to 40 doing all of the web activity to speak of. After age 40, the dip falls off dramatically until you get to seniors whose extent of web use is email. One interesting exception: RSS usage is flat all the way across the age groups! As surprising as it may seem to those of us who simply can’t start our day without our news feed, syndication just may not be taking off like everybody expected it to.

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
CSS Tricks

Web Design: 53 CSS Tricks In One Place

A nice little round-up of 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without, over at 9tricks. These represent the leading edge in everything CSS is capable of lately. It’s surprising that we don’t have more of it deployed.

A few observations on the list:

  • CSSWe’ve seen 1001 rounded corners tutorials, but none of them will compare with the one-line ‘border-radius’ feature… when all web browsers support them.
  • The dynamic piechart looks like one of those painfully-obvious image-sprite hacks, but you have to admit you never thought of it until you saw it.
  • The adaptive layout technique – this is the next feature we’re going to be crying for better solutions for, in HTML6 and CSS4. The massive array of screen widths we now have to deal with, from pocket-mobile devices to ridiculous monitors the size of a swimming pool, is a mark that it’s high time the device took care of more of this for us.

 

By EarthMovinMedia, ago
Ten-Minute .htaccess Guide

Web Design – The Ten-Minute .htaccess Guide

On any website using Linux website hosting, chances are good that you have the Apache web server software at your command, which puts you in charge of the most useful file on the Internet, the .htaccess file.

If you haven’t peeked into this file and learned what’s going on in there, you’re missing out on a powerful tool for disciplining your website (and unruly users!). You can edit it with any text editor – even Notepad! Below, a hint list:

Block directory listing:

“Options -Indexes”
What it does: Stops visitors from being able to view a directory in raw form. You might do this to prevent paid content being viewable for free, or for security reasons.

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By EarthMovinMedia, ago