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In Issue No. 302 of A List Apart for people who make websites, Joe Clark explains what E-book designers can learn from 10 years of standards-based web design, and Daniel Mall tells designers what they can do besides bicker over formats.

Web Standards for E-books

by Joe Clark

E-books aren’t going to replace books. E-books are books, merely with a different form. More and more often, that form is ePub, a format powered by standard XHTML. As such, ePub can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites. That’s great news for publishers and standards-aware web designers. Great news for readers, too. Our favorite genius, Joe Clark, explains the simple why and how.

Flash and Standards: The Cold War of the Web

by Daniel Mall

You’ve probably heard that Apple recently released the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update. The arguments run wide, strong, and legitimate on both sides. Yet both sides might also be wrong. Designer/developer Dan Mall is equally adept at web standards and Flash; what matters, he says, isn’t technology, but people.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart.

CSS3, Please! The Cross-Browser CSS3 Rule Generator. Very handy.

You’ve probably heard that Apple recently released the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update. The arguments run wide, strong, and legitimate on both sides. Yet both sides might also be wrong. Designer/developer Dan Mall is equally adept at web standards and Flash; what matters, he says, isn't technology, but people.

E-books aren’t going to replace books. E-books are books, merely with a different form. More and more often, that form is ePub, a format powered by standard XHTML. As such, ePub can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites. That's great news for publishers and standards-aware web designers. Great news for readers, too. Our favorite genius, Joe Clark, explains the simple why and how.

If you've seen those odd square bar-code-looking blocks in advertisements, then you have seen the QR code, a real world hyperlink. Intended to be read by mobile devices, it's a great method to provide hyperlinks on paper.

On March 4, the W3C published no less than seven new or updated working draft documents related to HTML:

• HTML5
• HTML: The Markup Language
• HTML5 differences from HTML4
• HTML+RDFa
• HTML Microdata
• HTML Canvas 2D Context
• Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML

Read full post

Posted in (X)HTML, HTML 5.

Many website designers run their own niche blog, and if the content is unique enough, a designer might be able to sell subscriptions to it. The content has to be very high quality, though, and few design blogs meet that standard.

A List Apart is one that does, and it could potentially turn a profit selling subscriptions. But the subscription route is a risky move because it alienates many users and shrinks ad revenue substantially.

Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher, founder and executive creative director of A List Apart, gives two reasons why A List Apart does not put its content behind a paywall:

• It’s against our belief in free online content.
• It wouldn’t work unless our competitors also put their content behind a paywall. We appeal to a discerning base of web designers, but if we went behind a paywall, it would be as if we had stopped publishing. Our readers would turn elsewhere.”

More at What Is the Future of Online News? | Webdesigner Depot.

W3C today named Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe its new Chief Executive Officer. "Web technologies continue to be the vehicle for every industry to incorporate the rapid pace of change into their way of doing business," said Dr. Jaffe. "I'm excited... W3C Staff

P Is for Publishing. And publishing, as you’ve heard, is dying. … But “the printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone,” Zeldman says, “either because books don’t require monthly hosting and blogs and websites do … or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.”

…[Jason,] Mandy and I are about to launch a printed book series, called A Book Apart, which derives much of its thinking and some of its formatting from what we’ve learned about PDFs in the past 10 years,” says Zeldman. The Mandy he mentions is Mandy Brown, creative director of Etsy and former creative director at W.W. Norton & Co.; she’s also one of the people speaking on the New Publishing and Web Content panel that Zeldman’s organizing for this year’s Interactive Fest, along with Happy Cog’s Erin Kissane, Harper’s Magazine editor (and Harper’s website creator) Paul Ford, and Lisa Holton, founder of new-media company Fourth Story Media.

…Everyone on the panel is committed to the digital future,” Zeldman says. “But we are also all committed to the book.” And how will their—how will our—relationships to books change, and how will those relationships remain the same, as the digitization of printed matter proceeds faster than most chain saws can spin? “How,” asks Zeldman, “can we be truthful and wise as editors, publishers, writers, journalists, and marketers straddling this scary yet exhilarating new divide?

Print & Paper Über Alles: A more perfect publishing today, Wayne Alan Brenner, Austin Chronicle (SXSW cover story), March 5, 2010

Related

• Austin Chronicle, SXSW Interactive Guide
• Books Not Dead: “New Publishing and Web Content” Panel Details at zeldman.com
• Panel Details at SXSW.com: New Publishing and Web Content, Saturday, March 13, 2010, 5:00 PM, Ballroom A, SXSW Interactive Festival, Austin, TX
• Happy Cog Studios: A Book Apart mini-announcement

Photo courtesy John Morrison.

See how to use CSS3's css-transform property to create an animated image-less loading spinner with just code, no images!

Six new links: "Researchers Plan To Automate Web Image Description", "What is Unclear About Captioning", "Update on the Section 508 / Section 255 Guidelines", "Web Accessibility Preferences Are For Sissies", "Plan to Assess Web Accessibility of 100 Cognitive Disability Organizations", and "Accessibility Issues on Vancouver Olympics Websites".

Seven new links: "Style a Fieldset with Rounded Corners Using CSS", "A Primer on Linear Gradients", "Styling a Horizontal Navigation Menu with CSS", "How to Add a Background Image with CSS", "Keep Your Font Stacks from Falling Over", "important is Actually Useful in Print Style Sheets", and "Understanding CSS3 and CSS2.1 Border Properties".

One new link: "What is Color Blindness".

One new link: "Why A B Testing of Web Design Fails".

One new link: "Agile 2010".

One new link: "The Future of Wireframes".

Two new links: "The Problem with Breadcrumb Trails" and "Accessibility of Links".

Two new links: "Philippe Le Hegaret - The Next Open Web Platform" and "Your Questions Number 5".

Two new links: "PX vs EM Design the Indifference" and "The Future Of CSS Typography".

Five new links: "Website Design: Impatient Versus Bored", "10 Unexpected Online User Behaviours to Look Out For", "Internet on Mobiles: Evolution of Usability and User Experience", "Cognitive Science", and "Gulf of Execution".