Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer- P20 pptx

Before we close this fascinating portion of our narrative, we must add one more reason to specify the player via the <pluginspage> attribute: If you don’t, the browser will choose one for you, often with hideous results. Read on. The iron-plated sound console from Hell Right up through its 4.0 browser, Netscape used to respond to WAV, AIFF, AU, and other traditional sound file formats by sprouting an ugly little con- sole. But the console did not simply leap up and start playing. Oh, no. Nor was the console actually part of Netscape’s browser, even though it was the default player. For reasons we can only guess at, Netscape chose Java as the foundation for the console. When you encountered a site that contained a sound, the page would stop loading, and the browser would seem to freeze. In the status bar, the dreaded words “Starting Java…” would appear. After a Vietnam-like eter- nity, the ugly console would at last pop up and blast the stupid sound. Now, suppose you did not feel like waiting for this mockery of a sham to run its course. Suppose you attempted to close the browser window or nav- igate to a previously visited site via the Back button. What would happen then? The browser would crash, of course. If most people did not detest embedded sound files to begin with, this tragicomic exercise in non-user-centric design certainly encouraged them to think of embedded sounds as one of Satan’s more diabolical efforts. THE TROUBLE WITH PLUG-INS While providing the visitor with linkage to the appropriate plug-ins page is certainly a friendlier gesture than simply abandoning her to chance, most professionals try to go one step further. They try to hide all the technolog- ical complexity from their users. Even something as simple as navigating to a plug-ins page can confuse and frustrate some users. 381 Taking Your Talent to the Web 16 0732 CH12 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 381 To work around this, most developers step in at this point and write a plug- in detection script. The theory is simple: If the user has the plug-in, the embedded content plays. If the user lacks the plug-in, some alternative is provided (perhaps something as simple as text). The user is never made to feel inadequate, never made aware that she might be missing something. It’s a beautiful plan, but as we mentioned in the JavaScript chapter, it has often broken down because plug-in detection is not universally supported. Netscape, having created JavaScript, has always used it in the browser to detect the presence or absence of plug-ins. Let’s take the Flash plug-in for argument’s sake. If the plug-in is not detected, the visitor might be taken to a page that explains that the site uses Flash and offers her the oppor- tunity to download the plug-in from Macromedia.com, as previously described in “The ‘Automagic Redirect.'” Because JavaScript was not originally a standard technology, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had to rely on another technique. Prior to IE5, Microsoft used IE-only ActiveX technology to handle plug-in detection. Before writing plug-in detection scripts, developers had to write browser detection scripts. If the browser was Netscape’s, the JavaScript plug-in detection script ran. If the browser was IE, ActiveX plug-in detection was triggered (and if the plug-in was missing, ActiveX would supply it). None of this worked on the Macintosh version of Explorer, whose users generally ended up in a hellish loop of nonfunctioning technology and self- contradictory error messages. This cruel stupidity should not be blamed on the Macintosh Operating System, nor on developers who toiled long and hard to work around browser deficiencies. IE now supports JavaScript on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. As users upgrade to new versions of these browsers, these incompatibility problems should become a distant memory. Yet software developers still sometimes confuse Netscape’s proprietary JavaScript APIs with standard JavaScript. That’s why two plug-ins men- tioned earlier in this chapter (Adobe’s SVG plug-in and Thomas Dolby’s Beatnik plug-in) don’t work properly with IE5/Mac. 382 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures: The Trouble with Plug-ins 16 0732 CH12 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 382 And web designers who don’t keep track of the ever-changing browser compatibility scene still make silly mistakes, particularly where IE5/Mac is concerned. For instance, even though IE5/Mac handles plug-in detection flawlessly, many Flash sites, when they detect the presence of IE on a Mac, refuse to let the user proceed until she has switched to Netscape’s browser. This makes no sense, but it happens all the time. We fear we are beginning to lose some of you in the back row. Snap out of it. We’re almost done, honest. If Plug-ins Run Free Earlier we promised to answer a simple question: Why don’t companies that make plug-ins charge web users to download them? After all, Exten- sis makes a bundle from its fine Quark and Photoshop plug-ins. Are the makers of the most popular plug-ins (Macromedia, Apple, Real, and Microsoft) simply beautiful altruists who want to teach the world to sing and don’t desire a penny for their efforts? That was, of course, a rhetorical question. Companies distribute their plug-ins at no cost because the value of these products is commensurate with their distribution. Put simply, a plug-in that is on 100 million desktops is vastly more valuable than one that is on a mil- lion. How do you encourage a person to try something? Let them have it for free. Indeed, as we’ll see in a moment, companies not only gave stuff away free, they paid other companies to promote their free stuff. Never have so many spent so much to earn so little. (Excluding the browser wars themselves, of course. Those cost even more and made even less.) Okay, so as a result of giving all this good stuff away for free, Macromedia, Apple, Real, and Microsoft have achieved what they sought: nearly every- body uses their plug-ins. So how do these companies recoup their invest- ment and hopefully even squeeze out a profit? They do it by creating and selling authoring tools. Web designers buy Macromedia Flash. Web producers buy Real Producer and professional QuickTime authoring suites. 383 Taking Your Talent to the Web 16 0732 CH12 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 383 Though Apple sells professional QuickTime suites, it also gives away some extremely capable video authoring tools with every new Mac. What is the sense in that? The sense in that is that these “free” products come with a Macintosh. If you want the free product, you buy the Macintosh computer. Similarly, Microsoft gives away WMF authoring tools to encourage you to buy Windows products. Some web businesses might have trouble coming up with revenue models, but software and computer companies generally don’t. While striving to reach ubiquity, plug-in makers have frequently partnered with content producers. For instance, at different times, downloadable trailers at a well-known movie company’s empire of websites have been available exclusively in Apple’s QuickTime format, and at others, exclusively in Windows Media Player format. The plug-in maker compensated the movie studio for favoring its product over competitive plug-ins. Today the cash flows in the opposite direction. A movie studio might pay the purveyor of a popular plug-in to feature its studio instead of a com- petitive film conglomerate on the plug-in vendor’s “Hot Downloads” page. Ubiquity makes for destinations, and destinations, if popular enough, can generate income. To up the income, the plug-in page sprouts ad banners— from free plug-ins to cold cash in twelve easy lessons. As we feared, none of that was as interesting as Jennifer Lopez’s dress. PARTING SERMON In Chapter 2, we discussed the way most popular plug-ins stream their pre- sentations to compensate for slow user dialup modem speeds. We also reminded you just how slow those dialup speeds really are. Please reread Chapter 2 before authoring high-bandwidth multimedia content or blithely adding it to a site for which it might be inappropriate. We web designers, most of us, anyway, live in a spoiled world of hyper-fast Internet access, powerful desktop processors, and wide-screen monitors. Most of the world does not enjoy such niceties, or anything half so nice. 384 HOW: Beyond Text/Pictures: Parting Sermon 16 0732 CH12 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 384 In fact, as the Web grows in popularity, the median average access speed declines drastically because there are more and more home users for every luxuriously appointed web professional. Though the field is expanding ten- fold, the web-using population is growing at many times that pace. Even if the profession were to stop growing, the number of web users would continue to rise. The day of universal high-speed access and fat bandwidth is not at hand. It’s not even close. While the prophets of high bandwidth high-five each other, millions in China and Africa and Alabama begin using the Web via a 14.4 modem that is shared by two or three families or 50 kids in a schoolroom. In libraries in America and around the world, those who cannot afford Internet access line up for hours to use public systems. Some of those systems are fast. Some are not. Few can afford to be tied up for hours just so some logo can spin. Even those on the fortunate side of the digital divide rarely enjoy the fastest speeds or the most reliable connections. When the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart jokes about the AOL busy signal, the entire audience laughs. They’ve been there. Most of them still are there. They are not only Jon Stewart’s audience, they are every web designer’s audience. And they’re the ones in the good seats. So treat rich media like you’d treat Jim Beam: responsibly. We end this chapter on a somber note, but the book on a happy one. Kindly proceed to Chapter 13. 385 Taking Your Talent to the Web 16 0732 CH12 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 385 16 0732 CH12 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 386 chapter 13 Never Can Say Goodbye YOUR DIALOG WITH THE WEB has now begun. And though this book, like young love, must end, our conversation will continue. You will find us, and we will find you on the pages of the World Wide Web. No book (indeed, no five-year program, if one existed) could teach you everything you need to know to design smart, attractive, user-focused websites. You will learn as you work—from teammates, partners, and even your clients. You also will learn a great deal from the people who visit your sites. You’ll be surprised at how many write—and not merely to complain when your single-spaced, 10px type sends them scurrying to the optometrist. But some of the best places to learn are on the Web itself, hence this chap- ter. In it we share our favorite online resources and explain the importance of continuing your education as the Web and your career experience growth and change. SEPARATION ANXIETY Throughout this book, we’ve shown methods used to design today’s Web and shared theories about how people interact with the medium. You need to know these things to begin working now. 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 387 But as we’ve also pointed out, the Web is changing; indeed, like the sea, or like some other Zen metaphor we can’t quite put together here, the Web’s very nature is one of constant change. Currently the Web is changing in an intriguing way—one that will move it closer to its founders’ original vision of an open medium, accessible by all people and available to all sorts of Internet-enabled devices. What will empower that happy change? It will come with the separation of style from content. What does that mean? It means you’ll stop welding your texts and functions and images together through overextended HTML. Instead, you’ll keep your visual design in one place (a Cascading Style Sheet) and your content in another (a series of HTML or XHTML documents; a database of XML-formatted text). The twain will meet on the web page, but their behind-the-scenes separation will considerably enhance your working conditions and your audience’s experience. Instead of painstakingly slicing apart images in Photoshop as described in this book or spending hours hand-tweaking hundreds of individual HTML documents, you’ll have time to spend on more interesting pursuits such as design itself—which is, after all, what you do. This change in the nature of web design as a practice will come when all web users employ browsers that fully support the standards that empower us to separate style from content: HTML/XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript/ ECMAScript, and the DOM. Not only do browsers have to change (and they are changing), web design- ers must also change—a proposition that requires the willingness to con- tinue learning and to risk discarding methods we’ve spent years perfecting. In February 2001, A List Apart reinvented itself with a standards-compliant design that separates style from content (http://www.alistapart.com/ stories/99/). As you might expect, the site (www.alistapart.com) is a good resource for information on that subject. The reinvention of ALA coincided with The Web Standards Project’s Browser Upgrade campaign (http://www.webstandards.org/upgrade/), which urges web designers to learn about and use the W3C recommendations we’ve 388 HOW: Never Can Say Goodbye: Separation Anxiety 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 388 discussed in this book, even if the resulting sites look less than delicious in older, nonstandards-compliant browsers. The Browser Upgrade campaign also asks web designers and content creators to seek ways to encourage user upgrades so that the Web can improve without leaving anyone behind. The Browser Upgrade campaign and the ALA redesign were logical next steps in the evolution of the Web. We launched them while writing this book, which brings up the problem with books. Namely, while books have the virtue of permanence, they cannot update themselves as websites can. We encourage you to continue learning by visiting educational and inspir- ing websites and reading and participating in web design mailing lists and forums. The remainder of this chapter will provide you with plenty to choose from. Use these resources to amplify parts of this book and to learn more about the emerging, standards-based Web. At the end of the annotated list below, we’ll return to offer a final thought about the Web and you. FROM TAG SOUP TO TALK SOUP: MAILING LISTS AND ONLINE FORUMS Learning by trial and error is part of any process and is certainly part of web design. Learning from other members of your team is a deeply bonding experience, but learning (and sharing your own knowledge) on a mailing list is a pleasure no web designer should miss. There are many, many mailing lists and online communities for web design- ers and developers. Some focus on specific technologies; others are vast, crowded, and general. Some function as job referral services while others mainly promote the people who created the list. Some are chaotic, others restrictive. With a little effort, you will find the ones that make you feel most comfortable. Following, in alphabetical order, are some of our favorites. 389 Taking Your Talent to the Web 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 389 A List Apart http://www.alistapart.com/ Each week A List Apart publishes useful tutorials (“Meet the DOM,” “Fear of Style Sheets”), challenging opinion pieces (“The Curse of Information Design,” “Sympathy for the Plug-in”), or both. And each week, after read- ing these articles, ALA readers respond on the site’s discussion forum. The site is noncommercial, and you need not reveal your identity or other per- sonal information to participate in the discussion forums. Astounding Websites http://www.astoundingweb.org/ Launched by Glenn Davis and maintained by Dave Bastian, this unique dis- cussion community was created to honor the best writing, design, and pro- gramming on the Web. Visit this small, friendly forum to discover inspiring commercial and noncommercial sites or participate by reviewing sites you admire. You can also submit your own sites for review in the Site Promo- tion section. The Babble List http://www.babblelist.com/ Maintained by Christopher Schmitt (and resurrected by him in 2001 after a brief hiatus), The Babble List is a well-run general web design mailing list, covering issues of graphic design, information architecture, writing, usabil- ity, project management, and related skills. Though the average Babble Lis- ter is a professional with at least two years’ experience, the list is beginner-friendly. If you find yourself stuck on a JavaScript or CSS prob- lem or wondering why your site looks great in one browser but poor in another, you can post your message to The Babble List and anticipate use- ful feedback. 390 HOW: Never Can Say Goodbye: From Tag Soup to Talk Soup 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 390 [...]... 11:25 AM Page 391 Taking Your Talent to the Web Dreamless http://www.dreamless.org/ Dreamless is a deep and open community primarily populated by young graphic designers and Flash artists Though the site’s gray-on-gray, Arialonly design gives it a somber appearance, it’s anything but dull Dreamless discussions range from the seriously spiritual to the deliberately silly The site has a fanatical following... your skull as part of an evil CIA experiment Note that W3C articles, while definitive, are among the least easy to read and understand of any we’ve seen—and that includes VCR manuals written in Japan You’ll do better if you check W3C to see what you should learn about; then read the friendly tutorials at Webmonkey, Builder, or A List Apart The Big Kahunas Let us now praise famous art directors: Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/)... (http://www.adobe.com/) not only makes great software for print and web designers, they also run a fine, vast site full of tutorials, columns, and articles on web, print, and motion design Disclaimer: Your humble author writes a column for this publication AIGA (http://www.aiga.org/), the American institute of Graphic Arts, has a long and noble history as a membership organization for designers But you know that... scripting and gimmicks than they are in ensuring that type is legible—let alone attractive and pleasurable to read.) Webtype gives you the lowdown on everything from 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 395 Taking Your Talent to the Web readability studies and CSS nuances to typographic explorations and downloadable typefaces Don’t miss the survey of fonts installed on PC and Mac users’ computers Founded by the. .. Lance Arthur’s personal magnum opus, is both sarcastic and smooth As if the site’s clever writing and smart scripting were not intimidating enough, Arthur manages to combine clean, spare, easy -to- navigate design with the technical dexterity of a dazzling showoff Harrumph! (http://www.harrumph.com/), Heather Champ’s charming and witty online diary, sports one of the cleanest web layouts we know Perhaps... intelligence, and rescue digital works laid waste by careless businesses Among the sites they rescued: 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 397 Taking Your Talent to the Web Mappa Mundi (http://www.mappa.mundi.net/) a smart, monthly web-only magazine and another Malamud/Webchick production, is perhaps the most intellectual of the noncommercial online ‘zines Spark Online (http://www.spark-online.com/) is an extremely... solely for that purpose, though a few are also commercial in nature Many of the sites listed require Flash and QuickTime, and it helps to have a recent browser and a fast connection Amon Tobin Supermodified (http://www.amontobin.com/), previously mentioned in these pages, is an extraordinary music site created in Flash A cold, high-tech look, with a warmly interactive embrace, the site will reward your patience... functional and easy to navigate Think the two can’t coexist? Look and see Once Upon A Forest (http://www.once-upon -a- forest.com/) is an abstract, deliberately cryptic work of genius by Joshua Davis, who also brings us Praystation and Dreamless 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 399 Taking Your Talent to the Web S.M Moalie’s Photomontage (http://www.photomontage.com/) makes us cry ‘Nuff said Marc Klein’s Pixel... Goodbye: Eye and Brain Candy Yenz: The Secret Garden of Mutabor (http://www.yenz.com/) is a navigable space of large, striking images that load quickly because they are entirely vector-based Created in Illustrator, Freehand, and Flash 3, the site guides you through one rich image field after another The effect is both mesmerizing and soothing ZX26 (http://www.zx26.com/) is a noncommercial Japanese font... from Dave Bastian, Joe Clark, Julia Hayden, Webmistress Jo, and your humble author The World Wide Web Consortium (http://w3.org/), the mother of us all, is the final authority on web standards Use it to keep track of existing and emerging technologies and to verify the way these technologies should work, before running off half-cocked, screaming about aliens jamming the radio transmitter embedded in your . Netscape chose Java as the foundation for the console. When you encountered a site that contained a sound, the page would stop loading, and the browser would seem to freeze. In the status bar, the dreaded. our favorites. 389 Taking Your Talent to the Web 17 0732 CH13 4/24/01 11:25 AM Page 389 A List Apart http://www.alistapart.com/ Each week A List Apart publishes useful tutorials (“Meet the DOM,”. Champeon, a systems guru who technical-edited Taking Your Talent to the Web and who co-founded The Web Standards Project, runs a tight ship. As list administrator, he keeps misinformation to a