tutorialblog.org— "The CSS Zengarden is a great project and helped the web standards cause. Today I?m going to be taking a look back over the hundreds of submissions and choose some of my favorites."
Jun 12, 2007View in Crawl 4
edesignweb, you may refuse to learn programming, but is it too much to learn the basics of usability and accessibility? And with so much traffic coming from search engines, how about learning semantic HTML?An example of design usurping usability, accessibility and the most rudimentary on-page optimisation for search engines:-<a class="user" href="http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/102/102.css&page=12">http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/102/102.css&page=12</a>- fat header image pushing content almost below the fold (actually below the fold in 800 x 600)- tiny fonts on left-hand navigation- all headlines are graphical (not helpful for search engines)- visited links stay same colour as non-visited links- black text hyper links camoflauged with non-hyper link text - impossible to see they are links until you roll over themIf people just want to design eye-candy, then I suppose zen-garden is a safe place for them to do so. Just keep these people away from the commercial world.
@thailand1972 "- all headlines are graphical (not helpful for search engines)"That's the beauty of CSS (at least when coded properly). Search engines and users who turn off all style sheets and images can still read graphical headlines, as long as a good image replacement technique is used."- visited links stay same colour as non-visited links"This is being done everywhere now, and on the vast majority of commercial sites. As far as learning some basic programming is concerned, I agree that a good designer should learn some scripting, AJAX, PHP, etc. and get their hands dirty in a few CMSs in order to design better.
@thailand1972 Actual raw text headlines are used in CSS Zen Garden, through tags. If you're using Firefox, go to View -> Page Style -> No Style, and you'll see what I mean. It *is* raw text, only treated with graphics when the situation calls for it (logos and headlines, for example). No alt tags needed.A bit of self-promotion, but this is the design I submitted to CSS Zen Garden:<a class="user" href="http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/194/194.css&page=1">http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/194/194.css&page=1</a>Turn off the style sheet and tell me if search engines can't read that.As far as visited links being colored as "visited" is concerned, that actually becomes a usability hindrance when it comes to tabs within a page that would look like they have been visited when they actually have not. Also, with dynamically generated content (especially various pages based on PHP/ASP/XML etc.) you do not necessarily know if a page that has been visited is actually "old" information (which is why a lot of people use RSS feeds).
tenebrousxJun 12, 2007
People who still use tables for layout
thailand1972Jun 12, 2007
edesignweb, you may refuse to learn programming, but is it too much to learn the basics of usability and accessibility? And with so much traffic coming from search engines, how about learning semantic HTML?An example of design usurping usability, accessibility and the most rudimentary on-page optimisation for search engines:-<a class="user" href="http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/102/102.css&page=12">http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/102/102.css&page=12</a>- fat header image pushing content almost below the fold (actually below the fold in 800 x 600)- tiny fonts on left-hand navigation- all headlines are graphical (not helpful for search engines)- visited links stay same colour as non-visited links- black text hyper links camoflauged with non-hyper link text - impossible to see they are links until you roll over themIf people just want to design eye-candy, then I suppose zen-garden is a safe place for them to do so. Just keep these people away from the commercial world.
hackajarJun 12, 2007
How can you not include "Killer Style" on a top 15 of Zen Garden css examples?<a class="user" href="http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://adjustafresh.com/zen/mozattack.css">http://csszengarden.com/?cssfile=http://adjustafresh.com/zen/mozattack.css</a>
rosefuJun 13, 2007
@thailand1972 "- all headlines are graphical (not helpful for search engines)"That's the beauty of CSS (at least when coded properly). Search engines and users who turn off all style sheets and images can still read graphical headlines, as long as a good image replacement technique is used."- visited links stay same colour as non-visited links"This is being done everywhere now, and on the vast majority of commercial sites. As far as learning some basic programming is concerned, I agree that a good designer should learn some scripting, AJAX, PHP, etc. and get their hands dirty in a few CMSs in order to design better.
antoinediggJun 13, 2007
I think the title is wrong, I don't see 15 great design, maybe 5 of them, that's about it.
resplenceJun 13, 2007
Shaun Inman really needs to stop using such ridiculously small fonts.
rosefuJun 13, 2007
@thailand1972 Actual raw text headlines are used in CSS Zen Garden, through tags. If you're using Firefox, go to View -> Page Style -> No Style, and you'll see what I mean. It *is* raw text, only treated with graphics when the situation calls for it (logos and headlines, for example). No alt tags needed.A bit of self-promotion, but this is the design I submitted to CSS Zen Garden:<a class="user" href="http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/194/194.css&page=1">http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/194/194.css&page=1</a>Turn off the style sheet and tell me if search engines can't read that.As far as visited links being colored as "visited" is concerned, that actually becomes a usability hindrance when it comes to tabs within a page that would look like they have been visited when they actually have not. Also, with dynamically generated content (especially various pages based on PHP/ASP/XML etc.) you do not necessarily know if a page that has been visited is actually "old" information (which is why a lot of people use RSS feeds).
mikekuulJun 14, 2007
I love Obsequience, been one of my favourites for a while now.