Interview - Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart

The Future

SitePoint: Which of the initiatives that are on the horizon do you think will benefit the Web's future the most?

The eventual disappearance of 4.0 browsers, along with improvements in standards-compliant browsers, will free us to seize the real power of CSS for layout and XHTML for document structure.

This will result in Websites that load fast over dialup connections. Sites that can be ported to Web-enabled cell phones and other wireless devices without requiring alternative versions and costly proprietary publishing systems.

These sites will be easier to maintain, far more accessible, and will last longer (many late 90s sites already fail in some recent browsers). Forward compatibility based on commonly shared technologies. It's a beautiful thing. It will free us to spend more time on content, design, and usability, less time on debugging and versioning.

SitePoint: Are there any up-and-coming standards you disagree with? Are there any you feel need to be adopted or created?

CSS is a great standard but parts of it have yet to be implemented in ways that are practical for designers; that last 5% of compliance is the toughest. And parts of CSS seem unnecessarily complex and/or obscure.

W3C has been working on that problem. The results may be announced before this interview is published. If not, they'll be available soon at http://w3.org/.

Some things are still easier to do with traditional (non-structural) HTML table-based layouts than in CSS. Sometimes that's because the browsers differ on their interpretation of CSS. But other times it's because CSS2 doesn't quite do everything you can do with tables, though it surpasses tables in many ways and allows you to do things you absolutely cannot do with traditional HTML-based design techniques.

XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML. XHTML 1.0 is brilliant because it can work just like HTML even in older browsers. But that fact alone has not proved compelling to some developers. W3C has begun to modularize XHTML, making it far more powerful and extensible, but these new and upcoming versions aren't yet browser-friendly.

As browsers advance, we'll see more sophisticated XHTML in play, and the benefits will become clearer. It's a good idea to convert to XHTML now, and many forward-thinking designers are doing that. More will scramble to catch up when the language matures and browsers support its advanced capabilities.

SVG is an XML-based vector graphics language with interesting capabilities and potential. But in current browsers, it requires a plug-in. Well, if you're going to use a plug-in, you may as well use Flash, which currently is far more mature and powerful and is also becoming more accessible.

In combination with other forms of XML, SVG will ultimately do amazing things, and it's worth learning about now. David Eisenberg has written a fine book to help us do just that.

Usability

SitePoint: What are your thoughts on the new MX line from Macromedia -- specifically Flash MX? Will it be the Next Big Thing for the Web in terms of interface and pages?

I've seen Jeremy Allaire personally demonstrate Flash MX and I have a copy of the program in my studio. Flash MX is a mature authoring environment and the Flash 6 player solves many problems for designers of animation-driven, heavily interactive sites. Flash MX provides absolute control of look and feel, and the ability to create sophisticated interfaces that work for anyone who has the plug-in.

Certain behaviors of Flash can be emulated via the W3C standard DOM. But the motion will not be as smooth, the visual effects will be less compelling, and older browsers as well as some new browsers will be incapable of rendering the work as they should.

For design-intensive sites and certain business and entertainment sites, Flash MX makes a great deal of sense, especially if you incorporate the accessibility enhancements (though these need to mature, and surely will).

For coders, Flash supports most of ECMAScript and much of XML, and it interfaces smoothly with other design products and backend technologies. The genie is out of the bottle.

I don't think Flash MX will be the next big thing. I think Flash has been a big thing since the late 1990s and will continue to be.

SitePoint: That said, what are your thoughts on the potential, power and overall usability of flash-only sites? Will the day ever come when this will be a good thing?

We may see an increasing split between document-centric sites primarily driven by Web standards, and animation-oriented sites powered by Flash.

If I'm designing a content site, a community site, a transactional site, or an informational site, I'm probably going to continue to do that in XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript, with Perl or PHP facilitating the user interactivity.

I'll use those standards for sites intended to last a long time and for daily or weekly publications intended to evolve over time. I'll use those standards for sites that encourage reader contributions via forums or commenting.

If I'm designing an entertainment site, particularly if the site has an expected shelf life of two years or less, I'd likely go with Flash MX, because Flash facilitates a kind of sexiness and excitement text-based sites can't match. It depends, though, on the project and audience, and also on the designer or design firm's particular expertise.

Many usability complaints have been answered with each new release of Flash. Flash MX supports bookmarking and the back button if the developer is smart enough to take advantage of those features.

Flash has had some usability features added since version 4.0, including the ability to copy and paste text, but it's up to the developer to implement those features, just as it's up to the developer of an HTML site to consider and accommodate varying user needs.

SitePoint: Okay, we don't get the joke. Could you explain the "The Jakob Nielsen Corner" on Zeldman.com?

The Jakob Nielsen Corner is so named because it enhances the site's utility by allowing visitors to choose a comfortable font size for reading, and to search through seven years of the site's content. I could have called it the Steve Krug corner -- he's a usability expert I admire -- but "the Jakob Nielsen Corner" seemed funnier.

Though it's whimsically labeled, the corner serves important accessibility and usability functions.