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.
I’m trying out NetNewsWire Lite, a free news aggregator for the Mac (thanks for the heads up, kyo!). If anyone’s interested here’s my RSS feed. One concern about making blog content available through RSS is the lack of tools in tracking RSS reader usage. Well, apparently a company is already developing such a tool. And of course, in the interest of revenue-making, another company is already thinking of delivering ads along with your RSS content.