The Beauty and Business of CSS

WE2004 presentation now online

[SuzyUK]

Doug Bowman's Web Essentials 2004 presentation on The Beauty and Business of CSS [stopdesign.com] is now online..

Enjoy!

<added>
and also announced at that show, a New Book

The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Beauty for the Web
by Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag

is due early 2005 and available on pre-order via Amazon

[mincklerstraat]

thx SuzyUK, very enjoyable indeed.

[Brett_Tabke]

<morning grump>
I find the site works best when you press Control-G in Opera. It wasn't until I stripped the css, that I could even find anything that looked remotely like a link. I feel the site is more readable and usable after the CSS is stripped out.
</morning grump - pass the coffee>

[encyclo]

Yes, a beautiful CSS design which copies the bad practices of a Flash presentation...

What's more, there's the question of factual accuracy. Brett, I believe you claim that ESPN's CSS redesign produces heavier pages than the with the previous markup - whereas this presentation says that each page view on that site is 50kb lighter. What gives?

[DrDoc]

hehe

I love the Microsoft case study ;)

[mincklerstraat]

What Brett says re. espn seems to check out - visiting webarchive.org, mid-February 2003 (when they had the do) shows about 80K, the first entry in March is hard get at - does some kind of redirect to current espn, and turning off js gives you an error page. Anyways, the current page is about 90K + css (check out the source, you'll see what looks like 50K of js - what on earth do they need all that for?). Quite likely the newer, more-stylish espn would have required a whole lot more K if it had been done with CSS1 - style layout. This is a bit of a bubble-burster since the espn site was such a poster-child for css back in 2003, being the first mega-commercial site to use advanced css that I know of.

There's a review Eric Meyer did of the site's lead designer on [devedge.netscape.com...] which is a good read if you're new to the thought of 'forward compatibility', and it seems like he's doing the right things for the right reasons - has his numbers ready too - I guess the majority of sports fans seem to need the heavy eye-candy. Espn's home page certainly won't be a contender for the 56K dash. It may have been even less of a contender, though, if this much glitz had to be done with the table - spacer gif combo.

Re the slideshow - this is the first I've seen from the 'design' world; I've seen plenty on php, security, caching, other dweebie topics. Slideshows put on the web do tend to be a bit irritating since there's really only one navigational path, and so much to guess about what was said about the slides - and I must say, Mr. Bowman's slide format beats most of the slide formats I've seen hands-down. Not a bad intro to css either, with newer developments like one-image rollovers and sliding-doors techniques.

[HannahG]

Thanks for that, SuzyUK. I must admit at first I was a little confused by it. But, I persevered and found some really cool CSS examples. That mouseover thing, wow! O_O

Also, on an aside, some of the examples are rather screwed in IE6. Looks beautiful in Firefox. *wishes for the day when IE is compliant*

[bunltd]

Wow, SuzyUK - thanks! I'm still working my way through it... It's a great collection...

*wishes for the day when IE is compliant*

Me too. Wish there was some consistency. (just spent some time explaining this to a client in simple terms)

LisaB

[SuzyUK]

@Grumpy Brett

Don't worry you'll get the hang of this new fangled stuff soon, if you used FF you would just have been able to TAB to through the links.. LOL < JK, I suppose we can't convert you no more than you us.. ;) >

btw there's more of the individual presentations online, and how else would you expect to see a CSS presentation..

• Designing with CSS: Past, Present, and Future [mezzoblue.com] - Dave Shea
  
• An Introduction to Web Standards [we04.com] - Russ Weakley
  
• Lost in Cyber space [we04.com] PPT (navigation accessibility) - Roger Hudson

There's more on the WE04 site and some of them are still in the making

>>ESPN, encyclo I think the page size question turns into the "holy caching war" and the 2 sides never agree ..

Suzy

[vkaryl]

*snicker* I'm laughing too hard at the Vodaphone example to go further at this point.... I'm sure it will be a treat though!

Thanks Suzy!

[NB, a bit later: I think what bothers me about this so far is the css itself. Instead of minimalism producing logical but still beautiful examples, this guy seems to have used every possible css element for every nit-noid thing he could code for - the file's humonguos and NOT commented! I'm not sure it NEEDS to be micro-coded.... but that's just POV: CSS-fairly-newbie....]

[vkaryl]

Looked some more, and not sure what happened the first time to make me think the CSS wasn't commented, because obviously it is.

I still think it's micro-coded....