No, this is not about plagiarism.
Imagine my surprise when Jeffrey Zeldman blogged about a list of 60 WordPress themes. A few minutes before that, I found Douglas Bowman bookmarking another list, also from Smashing Magazine. It’s like my feed reader was trying to tell me something: yes, a list article can bring an interesting discussion if you’ll just let it.
Back to Zeldman’s post, which started a discussion on whether you should use existing themes for your own design:
…Even if you are a designer, you may ask yourself if you really need to perform that next site redesign from scratch.
Every once in a while I get clients that specifically want existing themes to be customized instead of starting from scratch, so clearly there is a demand for the practice. If clients have enough initiative to choose it as a solution, then why not? Does it take more effort to find and customize than start from scratch? Depends on how comfortable you are with someone else’s code, how much you trust the other designer’s expertise, and how much you need to customize.
The bulk of the debate will probably lie mostly in this situation, but to me it boils down to don’t reinvent the wheel, but don’t get complacent either. While it is a shortcut for building a website, it is not a shortcut for conceptualizing the website.
So the other situation is this: Sometimes I envy all the beautiful themes and templates out there because I don’t really get an opportunity to use them for myself. Does choosing to use someone else’s work for a web designer’s own website make sense? It seems counterintuitive but a real problem: sometimes we barely have time to dedicate to our own projects. Sometimes we just want to use something ready-made and have fun with it.
Although there are frameworks for practically level of development these days, from CSS to JS to PHP to whole themes, they are created specifically as tools for designers; they aren’t really products for designers as consumers. What I’m talking about are the real themes that are smart enough, beautifully-designed enough to meet your discerning needs. It could be as stark as Cutline or as detailed as WordFolio: compare this and this. (Now that would be good idea for a list article: websites that are highly customized versions of existing themes. Not to mention a good source of inspiration. A niche gallery, even!)
We could probably exclude portfolio sites since web designers would prefer to show off their skills on them—but even that argument can be ruled out if the customization is custom enough. Take blogs, tumblelogs, and other secondary sites that still belong to a web designer but don’t necessarily need a design from scratch. The issues with the client scenario website still apply, but there’s the added pressure of being your own worst critic.
Would you be confident enough to use one, or would you lose sleep at night without customizing at least some bit of it to keep your design cred intact? It doesn’t have to be a bad thing; it could be a different type of challenge.
All the hoopla over Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!, a book by Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank (see also the Digital Web article) is making me feel uneasy.
We’re not wrong; the title is wrong
I detest the title of the book. No, I don’t think “everything” I know about CSS is wrong. I “know” about the display:table technique for months now (thanks to Sitepoint, again).
Neither do I think it’s a good idea to go around belittling people by telling them they are wrong, whether in printed book or online article format. It’s harsh and misleading.
We’ve got issues
As for the CSS Tables technique presented in the book, these are some of the issues plaguing it:
- tag soup
- lack of source order control
- the question of semantics and presentation vs. content: is making
<div>s behave like tables/table cells any different from using tables as layouts?
- IE6 and IE7 incompatibility (no surprise there!)
And not too long after the uproar, the authors have addressed the above problems:
Andrew Tetlaw responds to #1 and #3:
No one is negatively affected by the overuse of structural div tags. The same can’t be said for the use of HTML tables for layout.
And here’s an interesting quip which points out the very valid woe of web developers, who have had to adjust to all these changes in coding conventions because of our “flakiness”:
Congratulations on years of punishing web devs for using common sense. Finally the circle turns, but somehow you think that you were ‘right all along.
Matthew Pennell of Digital Web has this to say about those who question semantics and standards:
I must say that I’m surprised that an audience of (presumably) conscientious, standards-aware developers are almost all declaring that they will not use new features of CSS when they are available and supported. Are you all so short-sighted that you cannot see any application for the techniques discussed here beyond wholesale replacement of site layouts?
And Rachel has written this regarding #4:
Some commentators have suggested that we shouldn’t have put a book out about a technique that can’t be used immediately, that will require workarounds to still provide support for older versions of Internet Explorer. I disagree. Something I point back to in the book is how the web community began to use CSS for layout even though support in Netscape 4 was limited and buggy. If those of us who were building CSS layouts right in those early days had said, “nah, it doesn’t work in Netscape, can’t do it”, then our recent history would look very different.
Are we hesitant about change and innovation?
In a sense, browser usage does “cripple” our ability to look towards a future of web design innovation (and bliss) when IE6 is finally disappears. But are things right now are exactly the same as when Netscape Navigator 4 was the stumbling block?
More importantly, will the CSS Tables technique actually push our level of innovation by a significant degree? The past few months of new websites tell me innovation is not too hard to come by still.
And what about next-generation HTML5, which will have new structural tags like <header>, <section>, <article>, <footer>? Can one not feel guilty using all those <div>s in the midst of these elegant new tags? Perhaps that’s another debate for another day—in 2022.
Despite the the dot-com bubble bursting at the turn of the new millennium, the Web has become more intelligent, successful, and profitable in the past ten years. We have a ton of people to thank for that, but let’s focus on two groups that are celebrating their 10th anniversaries this 2008.
Google is one of the first web companies that reinvented the web as we know it. It essentially paved the way for what we call the Web 2.0 era because it was the better search engine that would leave Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, Lycos, Ask, and the rest behind.
True to its name, Google just keeps on getting bigger. It took on e-mail (Gmail), advertising (AdSense and AdWords), office suites (Docs, Spreadsheets, Sites), multimedia (YouTube, Picasa), navigation (Earth, Sky, Moon, Maps, Street View), and even web browsing (Chrome). And even if the thought of Google looking into what we’re looking at and what we’re talking about is really scary, life with the help of the big G is just easier.
In the same vein, A List Apart has been the definitive resource “for people who make websites”. What started out as a mailing list evolved into a treasure trove of elegant web design articles that cultivated the love for the craft like no other. Design, standards, accessibility, optimization, business—this magazine covers it all.
It’s written the pages of web design history as well, from banishing <table>-based layouts to inventing CSS techniques (Sliding Doors of CSS, Holy Grail, Suckerfish Dropdowns, Sprites, Faux Columns, Mountaintop Corners) we never could have come up with. Websites today are efficient, meaningful, and beautiful because of ALA.
