

CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing - ivankirigin
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/cssatten

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nickb
Yes, just what we need... more ways to make webpages look shitty, bloated and
unreadable. Over the past 4 years, I've personally done at least two dozen
usability studies and every one of the tests showed that simplicity always
trumps elaborate design. No matter what you're trying to accomplish, you're
always better off sticking to what people expect. People are used to Verdana,
Times, Arial. I hate some of these fonts but people will test better if you
stick to those fonts. Also, a lot of fonts just don't look great on screen and
test even worse on readability. MS spent a lot of time on properly hinting
these fonts so they are easy to read. By giving beginners this web fonts
option, you're giving them more bullets to screw things up.

Now, one place where you think this stuff would help is Linux. Since Linux
doesn't come with these "standard" web fonts, you need to substitute. Problem
is that you cannot just put a link to these fonts inside your CSS since
they're copyrighted by MS. So we're back to square one.

Rant: I wish Opera, MS etc. spent some time working on getting CSS2 working
properly! They're already pushing for CSS3 and yet BASIC stuff, like box
model, is all over the map and you still need hacks to get stuff working in
multiple browsers. How about these companies (cough, MS) spend time getting
the bugs out of current code so they can pass all those CSS tests instead of
pushing even more useless stuff? Opera's JS is still subpar and supporting it
takes a lot of tweaking.

~~~
ivankirigin
Anything that lets designers get closer to their intent is good. You can't
blame tools for bad design.

~~~
nickb
Fact is, people don't care about design. They care about usability.

Another fact, "ugly" sites sell better too:
<http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2006/mar/27prt.html>

~~~
ivankirigin
> Fact is, people don't care about design.

As if designers only make things pretty. I'm amazed at how people get easily
confused by this.

Interaction design is essentially the first step in making a useful system.
It's more important than the tech-cool aspects of a project, and is contained
in that nice phrase "make something people want"

Today's tools to make a webpage are worse than the options available to
designers for print media. That's too bad.

~~~
tipjoy
Amen. Why don't more software engineers realize designers are on their side?
If your product isn't meant to be used only by hackers like yourself, then you
need to have someone thinking about how the end user will understand/interact
with/experience your product.

If your design team is not trying to make a usable and delightful user
experience, then get a new set of designers.

Interaction design is NOT about making things pretty. It's about giving the
user a delightful experience. This includes making it match the user's mental
model of how the system should work, AND designing it so that users enjoy
spending their time (yes, using your product will take some non-zero amount of
time) using it.

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henning
Oh boy, a new generation of annoying, unreadable websites!

This along with Flex (who needs to copy/paste/bookmark things on the
Internet?) is going to make the web of the future really fucking annoying. I
can't wait! Dare I say, it is a GAME-CHANGER. Yeah, I said it, whatchoo gon'
do?

