Ionrock Dot Org

Today I read a little comment from Zeldman about his reading some other designers blogs regarding the recent trend (hype even) of using css and standards. I wanted to make a comment on this but also on the blogging community as a whole.

CSS and Standards

With regard to coding with standards, I think there is a potential problem in that designers can spend too much time thinking how than place everything exactly where they want it instead of making sure placing it there was a good idea in the first place. Zeldman notes that this kind of thinking is flawed because designers should be thinking of everything, code and design alike. While I agree with this I think he missed the point. The point is that design is about design and css/standards are only a tool. I think the fear is that people will begin to think css based design and xhtml is better because it is css and xhtml. This is obviously not true and I can vouch for this because many sites I have done using only css for layout and valid xhtml looked really crappy. This had nothing to do with the code but the fact that I a not much of a designer. The short version is that we should focus on web standards, css, xhtml, etc. only as a tool. Designers learn photoshop to make good designs and designers are learning css to make good designs.

Blogging Community

If you haven't heard there is an open source community builder project that makes orkut, friendster, etc. sites. Well I went to the homepage and looked around and saw a guy I thought I knew. I did not but I did go to his livejournal. I read a couple entries and one that was very political. What struck me as interesting was a notice about his opinions were not that of Livejournal.com! I thought to myself, "Thanks for that revelation!" In any sense, blogging is kind of a paradox in that you are really one in many and yet if you want people to read your blog you need to act as though you are much more important than you may be. Take myself as an example. Do people read my site? Probably very few and not very often but I still want to try and take the time to blog. I would like people to read my blog on a daily basis and find something useful. If I don't put something useful or express my opinions in a way that is convincing then no one will read. So, in order to make my blog better I need to write as though I am some sort of an authority on whatever I am talking about and yet I am just an average geek that no one really needs to listen to. I think it has sparked an interest in myself to write which is something I don't really enjoy. So I do think it is positive but keeping perspective is probably a good idea as well. Besides, if I ever hope to be a famous something or another I have to have some text to put in the Smithsonian... yup.