“The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.” (Possibly NSFW)

I’ve got a N91, not an E70. The N91 is customized to be an mp3 player, so it doesn’t have the fold-out keyboard, but it can do everything else the E70 can. And I’ve had it for a year and a half. I think it’s so funny to read the articles coming out in the US about the iPhone: “Oooh, it has Wi-Fi! And a web browser! And custom ringtones you make from iTunes songs…for 99 cents in addition to the price of the song!” I’m so sure! You can’t even use your own mp3’s to make ringtones? What century is this?

ETA “One thing PC users can do that Mac users can’t:” (Probably NSFW) Johannes’s computer is on the fritz (his computers are always on the fritz) and he’s started whining about wanting a mac. That’ll be lovely—then when that computer goes on the fritz, we won’t be able to fix it. Or does the 23.990 NOK purchase price—that’s 4,261.70 in USD—include service?

With old-school table layout methods, vertical positioning is a piece of cake. With CSS layout, it’s a piece of something else.

From A List Apart: Articles: Exploring Footers.

I hate it.

So I’ve been working on a new design for this thing since I converted to WordPress. I came up with a new design, but I didn’t like it. So I decided to go back to the old design. Which I have to recreate, since when MT crapped out on me I lost all the templates and HTML pages. So I’m recreating it, and I get it to work, then all of a sudden it doesn’t work, despite the fact that I didn’t change anything. Also the pages where I got the basic layout (footer bottom, even when the main text is shorter than the viewport), pages that used to work, no longer work. In Mozilla or r IE. Or an online example page will work, but when I copy it exactly to a page on my computer, it won’t work.

Why have web standards not progressed since, like, 1999? XHTML, which is really not any kind of an improvement, was 1999. CSS2 was frickin’ 1997. That’s almost 10 years ago. And we still have to use hacks like this:

#container {
position: relative;
min-height: 100%;
height: 100%;
voice-family: "\"}\"";
voice-family: inherit;
height: auto;
}

html>body #container {
height: auto;
}

to get things to work. I mean, WTF? This is the frickin’ web, people. How can the building blocks of the web have stagnated so much? I mean, we don’t use wattle and daub for making houses any more. Why do we still have to resort to crap like tables for layout in order to get decent cross-browser compatibility?

People are actually reading this blog now. I feel like I’m having visitors over and there’s dog hair and dirty dishes all over everywhere.

Working on the design for this blog is the first time I’ve worked on any kind of web design for a long time. I’ve been maintaining the few web sites I designed for other people in the past few years, but that’s just been adding and subtracting stuff–no actual design. Coming back to web design after a long period of inactivity always reminds me how much I actually hate this work.

I’ve been making web pages since 1994, and I’ve earned money from it since 1997. It used to be easier. Back when I was making web pages for the financial services departments at OU (sadly, the web pages haven’t changed since then!), we didn’t worry about standards. Everything pretty much looked the same in the few different browsers that were available, and most people just used Netscape, anyway. CSS was a neat tool for fancy tricks like making a link change when you hovered your mouse over it. You could make the page layout pretty much exactly like you wanted it to be, and everyone used tables to do so. I got a job as webmaster of Opera Software based on my HTML that used tables for layouts. Håkon Wium Lie, one of the inventors of CSS, was impressed with my code (yeah, I’m that cool).

Nowadays, standards are of utmost importance. Content and presentation must be completely separated. CSS controls the appearance of the page, while XHTML tags the kinds of information it contains. Not to even mention standards for accessibility. I was so happy when this philosophy came into vogue, and I still support it wholeheartedly. The only problem is that web design is now a nightmarish job, primarily due to the plethora of different possible ways of interpreting these standards. With the explosive growth of the web came the explosive growth of the browser market. Each of those different browsers, in each of their different versions, and on each of the different platforms, has its own interpretation of the standards, and each should be accommodated. Some web designers just make their pages very simple, à la Jakob Nielsen; others use massive amounts of JavaScript to feed different stylesheets to different browsers and/or calculate page dimensions to allow for layouts that CSS itself doesn’t allow (or layouts mangled by the browser’s interpretation of the CSS standard). Just when you’ve finally found something that works in one browser, it’s total rubbish in another. Web design just isn’t any fun anymore. Not for me, anyway.

Then there’s the fact that I’m just not all that good of a visual designer, period. I have a teeny bit of education in visual design. Enough to be better than 90% of the designers working at my level, but not enough to produce anything spectacular or beautiful. I think the work I’ve done for my father-in-law’s Romerike Helsebygg project is my best. He’s gotten a lot of compliments on it. But then I look at the stuff on CSS Zen Garden and I just drool. This is simply not an area in which I want to try to get employment. I haven’t got the visual design skills to do that part of it, and I hate the implementation part. That’s why I don’t want to be a web designer.

I really like information architecture, however. I like organizing stuff. I like the fact that good IA is based on user research. I like how IA helps people find what they’re looking for, which is the main reason people go to most web sites, anyway. Of course it’s important that the site looks decent, and even more important that the site works properly. It also helps if using the site is a generally pleasant experience. But if the IA isn’t good, there’s a good chance the entire endeavor will fail. In my opinion, IA is the most important part of a complex web site. That’s why I want to be an information architect.