[PLUG] Slightly OT: Good HTML design books

Ronald Chmara ronabop at gmail.com
Fri Apr 15 18:10:59 UTC 2016


Warning: Some of this is a bit rant-ish from watching the last 25
years of web silliness unfold....

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Jim Garrison <jhg at jhmg.net> wrote:
> As to the overall topic of "HTML Design", nowadays HTML is only a
> small piece of the puzzle.  HTML as originally conceived was a
> mishmash of both content structure and presentation.

Nitpick:
HTML, as concieved, was for marking up hypertext documents. It said
nothing about presentation. No colors, no fonts, no page layout, A
<p></p> tagset could indiciate a page break, a line break, a pause in
text-to-speech engines.

HTML, as extended, added things it shouldn't have, like colors, fonts,
graphics instead of text, scripting overlays of page interactions, and
eventually people were putting entire pages inside of a structures
meant for tabular data, that were completely non-portable, required
huge amounts of bandwidth, and reduculous amounts of times to make
trivial changes, couldn't be changed for text-to-speech, cell phone
formats, document indexing, document re-puposing (such as using the
same markup for PDFs, slide presentations (etc.), bulk redesign of all
collateral, (etc.).

This has caused a huge amount of problems, and created an entire
industry of people who just "translate" between incompatible
presentation and redering systems.... which wasn't a problem with
HTML, it was a problem created by *adding* things to HTML. Usually to
make it "look" certain ways.

>  Modern web
> design strives to separate content from presentation by using
> CSS to control layout and HTML to transmit appropriately tagged
> and identified content.

Definitely.

> The third piece of the puzzle is Javascript, which is REQUIRED
> to achieve any kind of fluid design because of CSS's limitations.

Again, to nitpick: Javascript to make fluid design is not fixing the
problem of  HTML content becoming encumbered with presentation and
rendering layers. CSS as a tool to enhance presentation and rendering
design has been quite useful, but it has serious limitations...
Javascript as a tool to enhance presentation and rendering design has
been quite useful, but it has serious limitations.... Javascript+CSS
can create the appearance of fluid rendering niceties, but if the
content itself is not well designed, it's just duct tape, bondo, and
spackle.  Properly marked up and stylized content can be rendered any
way the end user wants it to be rendered.

> There are many layouts that cannot be achieved using only
> CSS and HTML (play around with position:fixed and position:absolute
> for awhile) or require abhorrent hacks to implement (duplicate
> content under a fixed header).

Those are usually rendering issues. That's a part of design,
certainly, but there is an underlying battle here, between who owns,
and controls, the final rendered design. HTML+CSS+Javascript allows a
user to have a 9:16 page, and a 16:9 page, or a text only page, on as
many columns or whatever layout they want, if the end users can
easialy throw away layers and ignore things like fonts, colors,
images, visual locations of information, activities of information
interaction. This horrifies people who think in terms of the final
rendered output and action sets as their goal.... especially when
their design falls apart by doing something like increasing the font
size by 50%, or turning off images.

> Any book that focuses on HTML is like a book on automobile maintenance
> that covers only the interior trim.  Web design, especially responsive
> web design, requires all three (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and of those
> three HTML is by far the simplest part.

If one is requiring rendering-specific niceties (i.e., Javascript) for
your content to be usable, they have potentially made it useless for
people with vision issues... To re-use the metaphor, if a manual is
focusing on making a car look fast and shiney, but doesn't cover the
underlying mechanical setup, a car can "look" great, but still be
sluggish and unusable. A book on HTML only would be like a book on
basic automobile mechanics... it'll get you a usable vehicle, but it's
not going to get you an automatic spoiler in cherry red. A book on the
latest fads in HTML+CSS+Javascript (aka "HTML 5", which isn't about
HTML anymore, it's about the latest incarnation of the stack) can take
you down the road of building a shiney car tricked out in all the
latest fashions, which is of course subject to complete obsolecence in
another 5-10 years. So, depending on your goals, how much do you want
to focus on fashion and aesthetics, and how much to you want to focus
on raw horsepower and speed, and how much do you want to focus on
flexibility and utility, or, to put it another (much more elegant)
way....

As Louis Kowolowski asked in this thread:
"What kind of site are you wanting to create and maintain?"

If google is complaining about how your site "looks" on a cell phone,
get a few cycles on some cell phones and see if it's usable. Look at
the site on a big screen TV, look at it after turning off javascript,
look at it after changing font sizes, and use that for your guide.
Chances are that if google is complaining about a site, it's because
it was designed to look to pretty on some things, but not look usable
on all things, regardless of the thing used (IME, the most frequent
problems are things like tables and navigation bars, floating
elements, or other visual hacks to make things look pretty on a given
target system). You may be able to "fix" a great deal of things by
removing layers, and simplifying them, rather than adding more spackle
and bondo.

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Jim Garrison <jhg at jhmg.net> wrote:
> On 4/15/2016 3:27 AM, Richard Owlett wrote:
>> I don't have personal knowledge of any books. However two sites
>> presenting themselves as "tutorials" are
>> http://www.w3schools.com/ and http://htmldog.com/ . Both appear
>> technically competent. Their presentational styles are very
>> different. A brief discussion on
>> comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html indicates they appeal to
>> different audiences. Having tried both, I prefer the later.
>
> I beg to differ on w3schools.com.  While the quality *has* improved
> somewhat, it is still considered to be of very low quality.
>
> As to the overall topic of "HTML Design", nowadays HTML is only a
> small piece of the puzzle.  HTML as originally conceived was a
> mishmash of both content structure and presentation.  Modern web
> design strives to separate content from presentation by using
> CSS to control layout and HTML to transmit appropriately tagged
> and identified content.
>
> The third piece of the puzzle is Javascript, which is REQUIRED
> to achieve any kind of fluid design because of CSS's limitations.
> There are many layouts that cannot be achieved using only
> CSS and HTML (play around with position:fixed and position:absolute
> for awhile) or require abhorrent hacks to implement (duplicate
> content under a fixed header).
>
> Any book that focuses on HTML is like a book on automobile maintenance
> that covers only the interior trim.  Web design, especially responsive
> web design, requires all three (HTML, CSS, Javascript), and of those
> three HTML is by far the simplest part.
>
> --
> Jim Garrison (jhg at acm.org)
> PGP Keys at http://www.jhmg.net RSA 0x04B73B7F DH 0x70738D88
> _______________________________________________
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> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
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