What is your preferred approach when creating websites :
Make effort so pages looks exactly the same on every browser ? or
Let the browser apply its default stylesheet on some specific objects like inputs, borders, colors, etc. ?
The first solution is obviously what we would naturally have in a perfect world, but require a lot more work, CSS hacks, browser specific stylesheets and so on.
Is it what webdesigners should tend to do ?
About the second one, I'm thinking about forms, disabled elements, colors sometimes, table's header and footer... It is a lot easier to let the browser handle it and has the advantage of being consistent across websites for the user.
Is it a good practice or I am being lazy ? How to "sell" this solution to a client that don't care about those considerations ?
I'm looking for the pro and the cons of each method.
How to choose between one and another ? Where is the limit ? (How about : stick to the W3C standards and let the browser handle the rest ?)
The art of web design is to work within the constraints of the medium, of which there are many, and still come up with something 100% functional across many different platforms. It is a challenge to make your pages look good and function completely across all browsers at multiple screen sizes, resolutions, cultures, languages, connection speeds, accessibility issues, etc., If you can just accomplish "not broken in IE" that is something.
Of course I want it to look like it did in Fireworks, but that is not a realistic target. Every single machine is different, so every view of your page will be too.
You some CSS framework like Twitter Bootstrap Or Blue print. There are actually Many out there. Then if you are writing custom CSS I would recommend you to use CSS Preprocessors.
List of CSS Frameworks
List Of CSS Preprocessors
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
Since Twitter Bootstrap and many in the list cover responsive designs too so you dont need to rework for Tablets and other Equipments.I hope this list will get you started.
As a developer you would want a consistent look across all browsers. You don't want to have a lazy attitude as you suggested!! That is a terrible habit for a developer and leads to poor quality products.
Familiarize yourself with the different frameworks out there that address cross browser issues. Twitter bootstrap and jQuery are a great place to start. Also get to know the different browsers and understand what they support and what they don't, so that when you are coding you can avoid certain things!
While most web designers desire consistency across browsers, there's nothing inherently "right" about it being so, and in practice it depends on the nature of the web pages you are creating.
In particular, total consistency runs contrary to the principles of Progressive Enhancement and Responsive Web Design. There's no golden rule, do what's right for your client in each situation.
Related
What is the point of these CSS Frameworks? I don't understand them. When I look at them, all I see is boring layouts that seem overbearingly-difficult to adapt to your own unique designs.
Is this the case, or am I just missing something here? I'm referring to (frameworks in general) things like Blueprint, Less, Skeleton, 960 Grid system, Base, Gridless, etc etc etc.
I know this is a really simple thing but I just don't get it. I have searched but have not found anything that helps me to understand what the big deal is. When I look at their code, all I see is mess. Weird class and id names all over the place.
(This isn't a rant or complaint by the way, I just really don't get it.)
CSS frameworks are pre-prepared software frameworks that are meant to
allow for easier, more standards-compliant web design using the
Cascading Style Sheets language. Most of these frameworks contain at
least a grid. More functional frameworks also come with more features
and additional JavaScript based functions, but mostly design
orientated and unobtrusive. This differentiates these from functional
and full JavaScript frameworks. -Wikipedia
Advantages
They can help you learn CSS. You might just literally not know how to pull off a solid multi-column layout. A framework may be a
good place to get your feet wet understanding how CSS works.
They provide code that you just don't need to write from scratch every time, like resets. I've long been a proponent that the star
selector (*) margin/padding reset is a fine reset. I use it all the
time. But... if you are starting a major new project that is going
to be loads of pages, live for years and years, and will grow over
time, you should invest right away in a more robust reset. All
these frameworks start with brilliant resets that cover all the
bases and will have you covered for years to come.
They relieve cross-browser concerns. You can't undervalue this. We've all felt the burn of finding out our sites are borked
in some browser or another at a hugely inopportune time. Frameworks
are built to bring their magic to all browsers.
It helps you build good habits. Like including a print stylesheet in your projects. I always intend to build one, and I
often do, but the chances are a lot higher that I do it if I have
one there from the get-go.
They encourage grid based design. Which is a good thing. Grids don't mean boring! They just help you achieve better
readability, scanability, balance visual weight, flexibity,
expandability, and just overall page page cohesiveness.
They come with documentation. If you need help getting started, framework generally come with some support files. This can be
particularly nice if you are designing a site you will be handing
off to a client. You can just let them know what framework you used
and refer them to that documentation for support requests.
They lay groundwork. If you are using something like YUI, your life will be a lot easier if you use All-YUI-Stuff-All-The-Time.
It's built to work together and built for expandability.
CSS-Tricks
Also see: Comparison of CSS frameworks
I've recently been going over some HTML and CSS stuff to get more into web development, I have been designing sites on and off for a while now and I would love to start actually developing some.
I've seen Bootstrap mentioned so many times all over the internet and I was wondering if someone could help me out and point me in the right direction... I've been learning the fundamentals of HTML/CSS and as I understand it, Bootstrap is a html/css UI framework?
I have my own UI designs in a PSD file, how would I get them to work within Bootstrap?
Is it a matter of slicing up my images and adding custom CSS into Bootstrap?
I know that I am a long way off from this, but this is the type of stuff I want to be doing:
http://heyflat.com/themes/todo/index.html
If you can point me towards the type of stuff I should be learning in order to get there I would much appreciate it, so far I will continue with my html/css stuff but I would love to start using Bootstrap and customizing it seems essential to me for what I would like to be able to achieve...
Thank you for reading :)
Updated
Overall, my process has not changed much except for how I think about converting PSDs to HTML and CSS. I look forward to the day I discover a tool as flexible and comfortable as Photoshop that can output directly to good HTML and CSS. That day has yet to come to me. Here's the process I follow, utilizing Photoshop and Bootstrap.
I find that Photoshop is a great way to imagine, share and iterate over a visual design because it frees me to experiment in ways that are currently either impossible or too time consuming to realize just with HTML and CSS.
Once a design is agreed upon, I begin planning how the target design will be realized with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I consider the browsers of my target audience. For example, IE8-, does not support rounded borders. If IE8- users are a large portion of my audience and those rounded borders are critical to the design I may take the time to slice out images and add extra HTML and CSS.
I decide if I am going to use a framework like bootstrap. Browser support must also be considered when deciding on a framework. If a framework has examples like bootstrap then I can checkout those examples in various browsers. If using a framework then I commit to doing it their way. That is, I use their grid system, html and class names for everything. I only add my own when the framework cannot meet a specific need. I do augment their classes as needed using a separate stylesheet but always in appropriate, low risk ways, bootstrap encourages this. I will probably never augment the grid system except perhaps through their customizer, but I have never needed to do that.
Next I implement the design. I may find that some elements need to be sliced out of the PSD, but most, like drop shadows, rounded borders and gradients, can be rendered using CSS. Some aspects of the PSD may need to be tweaked to accommodate responsive behavior or to make implementation simpler. As has always been the case, I target standards compliant browsers first and adjust for the others later. One of the nice parts about a good framework is that there is usually very little that needs tweaked.
I review the document at various resolutions in browsers my target audience use, and consider and implement additional tradeoffs as needed. For example, if it is not critical that those rounded corners show up in IE8- then I will keep it simple, render them using CSS, and let IE8- alone. I still verify that it looks acceptable in IE8 and IE7.
Steps 4 and 5 are generally not sequential but steps I bounce back and forth on. Also, make sure your client is on board or you can get them on board with how you are supporting various (not-so-modern) browsers and your reasons for doing so (shorter load times, less development time, easier maintenance, and so on).
Bootstrap 2 examples: http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/getting-started.html#examples
Bootstrap 3 examples: http://getbootstrap.com/getting-started/#examples
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Does it make sense to use the <table> tag on a “modern” website?
Everywhere I go I see don't use table layout, it's evil, even Google says that, so why one of the most visited websites, Google and Twitter, use it for their homepage?
I don't think it is any kind of mistake, or any other stupid problem.
The only reason I can think of is, that they want the page to look similar even if client doesn't support CSS, like with Lynx.
So why everyone say it is so bad, if the biggest websites on the internet use it.
In my opinion, there are some cases, like those mentioned above, where it is vitaly important to have the same look everywhere, than it is OK to use tables.
edit: The same question goes about html elements like <center>, or formatting text with attribute align and other "html attributes and elements used to substitute CSS functionality"
Page load time is king for these guys, and bandwidth usage is extreme.
I'd have to say they use tables for raw data speed, since they are serving up so much bandwidth every day.
Also, notice that they use inline styles in the page header to reduce the number of HTTP requests to help speed up page load time.
Table layout gets more grief than it deserves. It's easy for developers to use, it's consistent across nearly every web browser, and it allows you to easily add rows/columns with little to no effort.
The only downside is that it goes against the mantra that your document should only contain content, and your design should be contained separately (in a CSS file).
Google doesn't have to care about ranking high in search engines... ;)
Yep, agreed. Sometimes, just sometimes tables are just fine. Not everyone is writing websites that are targeted at every possible browser, that needs to support text to speech etc. In general, try to learn and grow your skills and use CSS positioning etc, but nothing bad will happen if someone uses a table to position things on a webpage.
Maybe this question should be community wiki, though?
It's evil, it's a pain, but rendering is pretty much guaranteed to be consistent across different browsers.
Table layout is working on most browsers. Google and others want to reach all user, not some or only modern users. Having different layouts or layout technologies is hard to maintain and costly in delivering content.
Table layout is not tricky. Its straight forward. You dont have to look for css hacks, browser incompatibilities or others.
Table layouts are bad. Because thy mix layout and content.
Twitter works pretty well from phones in web mode. Some web browsers are truly gruesome, so I assume Twitter does what it has to.
Given how poorly so many web sites work on phones, I'm more concerned about mobile compatibility than with the concerns of CSS evangelicals.
Three main reasons:
Tables are mainly bad for search engine reasons (there's also the issue of them messing up the DOM a bit, but that's not too bad). People don't search for Google on search engines, and people don't search for Twitter posts on generally either.
Tables render consistently on nearly every browser, including smartphones (which is a big concern for Twitter especially).
Tables consume less bandwidth. Both sites have immense data loads and need every bit of speed they can get.
Browser Support - These guys need to have their websites render perfectly on ALL web browsers (New, Old and Obscure). No matter who's using their websites and what OS/Browser their using, these websites need to work.
Each web browser supports it's own implementation of CSS and this causes a similar issue to that of the JavaScript DOM support in various browsers.
Page Load Time - Also their pages are optimized for Page load times. If it takes a user too long to load the page they'll just go somewhere else. There are still plenty of users without broadband, even a lot of mobile devices don't have very fast connections depending on where you are.
I am a Web developer and in my projects I have noticed that my weakest point is not being good at the front-end design. Relying on other designers can be annoying if they are not able to produce as quickly as I want.
My perspective on HTML/CSS is that it is basically a big hack that amazingly works. There are too many CSS and browser specific bugs/quirks to learn and remember them all without spending extreme amounts of time trying to untangle everything. Is there a fast track route to getting CSS into my brain? I have looked at some CSS books, but to me they really read as long lists of how to render things correctly in IE6 and how to make corners rounded. (Seriously why does it require so many tricks to make a sharp corner round? On any platform but the Web this would be called a major oversight.)
Does there exist something that does the analogous to CSS that jQuery does for JavaScript? Using jQuery you don't need to know JavaScript well to make things that work.
I am not interested in learning why IE6 does things in weird ways because I don't care about supporting it at all. I am more interested in a method of learning how to use CSS to do what I want without spending hours and hours reading obscure blogs.
Pencil and paper to sketch out your ideas (think in boxes, not triangles or hexagons), then just break down all the little parts and learn how to do each one. No problem is too big that it can't be broken down. And, like always, TMTOWTDI!
Find examples and learn from it—at least that's how I started learning. Study the styles used and play around with them. When you find something that does what you like, create a mock-up and play around with it. Then test it for cross-browser compatibility.
If you get frustrated because something works in Firefox and Chrome, but not in IE (this will happen a lot), don't give up. I find cursing Bill Gates' name and all he stands for is a great stress reliever. :-)
A great tool I like to use is Firebug, a plugin for Firefox that allows you to, among a great many other things, edit CSS rules in-browser and see the results as soon as you do it.
I agree that CSS was kind of an afterthought in the web design world, but it's one hell of an invention and makes things so much easier and quicker to develop.
Yes, there are CSS frameworks that are the 'jQuery of CSS'. Some of the more popular ones include 960 and Blueprint. I personally use 960 and have found it takes a lot of the guesswork out of layout.
As others have said CSS is hard to learn by reading. It ends up being one of those things you just need to develop an instinct for through lots of experience (which typically means lots of trial, error, and frustration). It is, as you've highlighted, not an ideal situation, but it is what it is.
Another difficulty is that the methodologies or workflow that is employed can really differ between individuals. Some people do a mock-up in Photoshop first, then produce an exact pixel-by-pixel "rendering" with HTML/CSS. Others use Photoshop, Illustrator, or another tool to simply sketch out and idea, and then re-create it from scratch in HTML/CSS. And still others prefer to start directly with HTML/CSS and just a few thumbnail sketches. Figuring out which of these methods fits you best is anthoer important piece of the puzzle.
It pretty much takes time and practice. But you can save yourself a lot of trouble if you keep your html clean and straightforward. Here are a few rules I can think of that have helped me:
Use DOCTYPE in your html pages, start with transitional since it has the most lax rules, and validate your html. If you keep your page in standards mode rather than quirks mode, you will have significantly fewer problems across the board.
Pick what browsers you will support early on and support them in a logical order. For me, I develop in firefox, then make sure that things are solid on chrome / safari. IE can use a special kind of comment that lets you insert html visible only to IE. Use that to add on stylesheets for IE7, then IE6 to override styles and fix any display issues in those browsers. You should generally start with the best browser first and work your way backward.
Be careful with padding. That is one of the most problematic properties I've dealt with. When you can, opt for using a little sub-container element with a margin in place of padding. It's more markup but margin is handled much better across all browsers.
Absolute-positioned elements inside of relative-positioned elements. This solves a LOT. When you relative position an element, it stays in it's normal flow. When you absolute position elements inside of a parent that is relative, the absolute items work in reference to the location of the parent.
In this case I don't think books will help much. CSS is extremely easy to learn, and extremely difficult to master.
All I can suggest is learn as you go.. You need a lot of experience!
Or, you can drop support for IE7 and especially IE6. If you do that you'll find very very few and very very rare quirks :)
Take some classes in graphic design. No programming language will make you an artist, and artistry is required for good user-interface design.
[or you could find better graphic designers to work with]
Subscribe to css-discuss, play with the common problems and talk with other people about your progress. The wiki is a very useful resource too.
I'm trying to compile a guide for students used to publishing in print who are learning web design.
Some obvious things which web developers know but they don't:
You can't rotate graphics in HTML
All objects have to be rectangular, you can't have a circular DIV
Many typographical effects in their repertoire can't be achieved
Some things which are tricky are:
Can they have variable opacity? Well, yes and no.
Can they have rounded corners? Maybe.
Some things which aren't technical difficulties, but which are problems:
Image file sizes: I have a student who wants to have a different large graphic header on every page of their site; that's not technically a problem, but it will mean a visitor has to wait for a new graphic to load every time they navigate
Accessibility: "why not just make everything a graphic, to overcome the limitations of HTML?"
Please help me fill out my list and add any hints or tips for people making this transition.
web is not print
Layouts can be fluid.
elements don't have to be absolutely positioned
web pages need to be checked in several browsers for compatibility
avoid divitis; from experience people coming from print into this field do everything by brute force instead of trying to think of elegant solutions for optimization and semantics purposes
print is consumed visually - the web is consumed by people with visual impairments as well. Don't forget lynx users no matter how small the market share is :)
semantics is important, learn about them
thats all i can think of right now...
Coming from someone who has done both print design and web design (and done a decent job at both, I think), it seems like you're off to a good start. Other thoughts:
Darko Z mentioned this but I think it's worth stressing that browser incompatbilities must be recognized and dealt with. In the print industry there are standard formats like PDF which guarantee that things will come out in print the way they look in design; besides, many publishers will directly accept the native file formats of the most popular design programs, like Adobe InDesign, Quark XPress, even MS Word (for the cheapskates ;-P). The point being that print designers are used to a "set it and forget it" approach where they assume that once they design something a certain way, it will stay designed. The fact that there are different web browsers which render the same web pages slightly differently is likely going to be a major pain in the butt for people used to the print world.
Addendum to the above: fonts. You can't use (or at least can't rely on) uncommon fonts in web design, for obvious reasons.
Screen real estate has to be used effectively because there's a limited amount of it. And I mean really limited - no matter how hard you try, you can't write HTML that will make someone's monitor expand 5 inches or put another screen on the back ;-) It's not like in print where people can peek back and forth between different pages of a book. Reading web pages is kind of like looking at parchment through binoculars; you have to design the pages with that limited field of view in mind.
Web page designs are dynamic and transient; they stay up for a while, they get boring, they get recycled/replaced with new designs. So you're not stuck with mistakes. But it also means you need to design with future changes in mind, e.g. by using CSS so you can change the look of whole classes of elements easily. There is some use of styles in print design but nowhere near as much as online.
Fonts and Text
You are limited to a small subset of
fonts
Fonts are viewed at different sizes
There is a readability limit for how
wide paragraphs should stretch (in a
fluid layout)
Write for readers of all types - Some
will skim, others will read in detail
Images
Sites are viewed at different
resolutions and screen sizes - Design accordingly
To achieve transparent backgrounds in
IE6, use PNG8 with alpha (IE6 doesn't
support varying levels of
transparency, it's either 100%
transparent or it's opaque)
Use CSS sprites
Images should not be used in place most of text
The img tag should be used for images
with semantic value and all layout
images should be CSS images
Every img tag needs to have the alt
attribute to validate
(X)HTML and CSS
Browser rendering varies greatly
Validate CSS and (X)HTML for a
greater probability that the design
will be cross-browser friendly
Don't use CSS hacks
Use the proper semantic markup
Pages should be able to work without
JavaScript enabled
Read Yahoo's guide for
performance and use YSlow
Dreamweaver's design mode doesn't
reflect how a page will appear in
real browsers
General Design
Simpler is often better in terms of
usability, accessibility, design, and
download size
Lists of greater than five or six
items should be broken up visually
Consistency is important - Don't
change your navigation, etc without
an extremely good reason
When choosing colors, keep those with
color-blindness in mind. This will
affect how you choose to convey
meaning by color.
Place the most important information
above the fold (the part of the
screen that shows without scrolling)
The web is interactive. This
drastically affects how you consume
and display information. You can hide and subsequently display information using tabs, accordion, and similar methods.
Think in terms of primary and
secondary calls of action. What do
you want the user to do? Where do you
want them to go next?
Some broad points:
1. Print is static, the web is interactive.
The essence of a print project is a fixed point in time, an idea captured on paper or some other substrate. Web projects are moving, changing experiences that represent both the ideas of their creators and their users.
2. Everything is uncertain.
You mention typography in your answer, it's probably worth broadening that to cover all aspects of appearance. The variety of operating systems and hardware available mean that its hard to determine how all your audience will experience your final design. Whilst some things must be compatible across all browsers, sometimes it is not worth the time and effort needed to make something pixel perfect in all systems.
3. Learn about programming.
Unless you've an aptitude for it, you don't need to learn how to program for the web. But it would still be a big help to gain some familiarity with web programming, as if you can't code, you'll need to work closely with someone who can and you need to be able to communicate effectively with them.
4. Create working prototypes
When something is static, it can be designed using a static format. To design something interactive like a website, you should be making use of moving prototypes that represent the kind of behaviour the final design will have. You can use paper to do this, or more sophisticated mockups using xhtml, css and javascript, or a dedicated prototyping program.
The user controls how they want to see content on the web, not you. Your design will not look the same to all people because some people may make it different on purpose.
Screens can be arbitrarily large or small
The web is interactive: usability trumps pretty-lookingness
Your page will be read by machines: make sure the data is easy to get at by scripts that can't read images / large blobs of text (aka "be semantic")
Remember to save your jpg files in RGB format not CMYK format. I regularly get sent jpgs that won't display on a web-site and every time it's because it's been saved in the wrong format from Photoshop.
This will become less of a problem as browsers support more image formats, but considering that 20%+ of users are still on IE6 for the sites we develop this will take a while to go away.
A lot of these are good rules of thumb for print designers who want to learn how to actually markup HTML and write CSS. But as a Web developer in the past, I'd frequently just take a designer's template and write the HTML and CSS for them. Whether or not that task was simple or difficult depended on the designer's awareness of the capabilities of CSS.
There was one pain point in particular that kept coming up. So for print designers moving to the web, the absolute number one rule to remember is:
Don't design any element to have an explicit, pixel-perfect height. You can restrict the width all you want, but changing fonts, preferred font sizes, and different text strings being pulled from the database on different pages means that text needs to be able to flow vertically without generating hideous, hard-to-use overflow scrollbars.
Designers who remember this can usually conjure up designs that are easy to cut up and integrate in a mostly semantic manner. Designers who forget this sometimes end up creating designs that have to be shoehorned into a 3 inch by 3 inch box, and that's when I reach for the vodka.
A given color or font will render differently in different browsers.
Especially when one browser is on Windows and the other is on Mac or Linux, etc.
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago - http://aloestudios.com/2008/08/dear-print-designer-doing-web-design/
So did my friend Mark - http://www.visual28.com/articles/tips-for-better-web-design
Jeffery Zeldman's book Taking Your Talent to the Web is specifically targeted to the question you have asked. It's been out for a few years...not sure if there's a 2nd or 3rd edition. Check it out.
My main advise is that you need to recognize that while you have dot precision in print applications, most of the time in web design your focus is to design and code a site that will accomplish your content and layout goals for any number of platforms, resolutions and color depths. Color depth has become less important than it was in the past.