Clarendon, Web Standards and the New DeeBeeDee
Jeffrey Zeldman today discusses the use of Clarendon in his work. I correctly observed his use of the ubiquitous typeface in the redesign of Zeldman.com but I totally missed the initial implementation of it in the redesign of Happy Cog. I guess I haven’t really followed Zeldman’s body of work closely until recently, when I started subscribing to his sites’ RSS feeds using Net News Wire.
I bought Zeldman’s book Designing with Web Standards sometime last year but I am now just reading it. It’s a book that pushes for the building of forward-compatible sites by advocating web standards such as XHTML, CSS, XML, ECMAScript and the DOM. I’m glad to say that I’ve been coding in XHTML for a while now. Thanks to my faithful reading a few years back of the now-defunct Web Techniques magazine (which became New Architect), I was convinced early on of XHTML’s benefits and was taken by its easy implementation. I’ve also been using CSS stylesheets in lieu of the <font> tag and other deprecated formatting tags. But one thing that I have not gotten myself to do is to use CSS2, or layer positioning. I’m still a holdout for tables, even sometimes for ones with a smattering of one-pixel gifs to hold them up (yeah, I know, kill me now). My last foray into CSS2 experimentation was frustrated by a yet fully web standards-compliant IE 5 for the Mac and the equally-wanting Netscape 6.0.
I remember promising in 2003 to serve up a new version of DeeBeeDee before the year was over, but alas, it has not happened. But thanks to Zeldman’s book, I’m convinced now is the time to finally take the plunge into CSS positioning. It’s also time to finally get rid of this awfully dark and archaic-looking site. My transition from a Pirouz/Siegel design disciple to a Zeldman zombie is underway.
Tags: clarendon, css, design, pirouz, rss, siegel, webdesign, webstandards, xhtml, zeldman
June 26th, 2004 at 4:06 am
Hmm. Well, I *was* starting to get sick of using Verdana and Tahoma ALL the time…
June 26th, 2004 at 10:51 pm
I’m not a proficient coder, nor am I familiar with XHTML, but how can CSS2(?) use other fonts other than the Web standards? I don’t know if you can embed fonts, or is this a feature/script in XHTML?
Hey and if you’re updating your site, no Clarendon please
June 26th, 2004 at 10:57 pm
I think I found it, dynamic text + text images?
June 27th, 2004 at 12:25 am
Hey Marc, but I like Clarendon!
The use of Clarendon is strictly limited to raster images (i.e. created in Photoshop). It wasn’t meant to be specified in the style sheet.