My predictions for Web design in 2007
Monday December 11, 2006
Some things are obvious - we all know that they're going to happen, but many of them I wish were not true. Like browsers
- I suspect that we're going to have to design for browsers like IE5 and 6 for a while yet. These are my predictions for the Web design industry for 2007 - what are yours?
Comments
Well I understand some of the reasons why tables are still used for element positioning. I’ve only recently (through prodding by this website) converted most of my website to CSS. I still use a table on one part of my website and plan to update it soon. I’ve found that Frontpage was more of a problem than a solution to going to CSS and found that NVu let me do a more standards based website. This has reduced complaints about viewing on all the more popular browsers. I’m a CSS convert.
Such a negative list! Unfortunately, I also agree with most of your predictions. The industry is in a sad state when so many designers, developers, and customers are so far behind.
Your post inspired me to write my own list as well… not as focused on design/development, but more on the industry as a whole: 2007 Web Industry Predictions
I never understand this thing about CSS Layouts being ‘boxy’. As I see it, Tables are even worse for being ‘boxy’ - adding CSS allows you to break out of these boxes.
The only reason I can see for people refusing to use CSS is that they always have used the ‘old way’. And these will be the first to go down - they refuse to grasp what’s new and, as technology moves on, it’ll leave them behind. They’ll only have themselves to blame for not succeeding, and perhaps that will be a good thing - survival of the fittest and all that.
What we need is sites like CSS Zen Garden and Eric Meyer’s CSS/Edge to show the ignorant what CSS can do, encouraging them to do what is needed.
With reference to IE7 - I think the faster this comes the better - if only there were a way to force it on everyone, our lives would be so much easier.
Even better though, would be a move to standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox and Opera, which have faster release cycles, and so are likely to keep up to date faster.
OK, Firefox is touting a 10% market share. But this is probably only the users who use the internet on a regular basis. How do we tell Mrs Email that there’s an alternative? Will Microsoft tell her through Windows? Unlikely. And this will leave a large proportion of internet users who contnue to use IE because they don’t know there’s an alternative.
I notice a trend here. What we need is to inform those who don’t know about these things, and show them that they can improve things just by changing their habits slightly. They’ll never look back - I know I didn’t.
Phew! I think that’s enough for today
I like CSS, but until there’s better browser compliance CSS sites will face resistance IMHO. In my experience CSS sites using vertical menus or layouts frequently vary in appearance with different browsers or even fall apart when windows are reduced in size. I thought it was just me, but I’ve seen this problem on too many CSS sites to believe that anymore.
I love the concept of CSS and a world where everything adheres to a standard. It would certainly make our lives easier - but I doubt we’ll ever see that world. I use CSS when I can, but in the end I want my sites to work reliably in different browsers, different window sizes, and different resolutions….tables are just more efficient at times.
And as far as using Dreamweaver or a commercial product - well I think designers should use what works best for them. But having said that, I’ve found “web designers” (not implying anyone here) who don’t really understand the underlying code but only understand their software. I’ve not used Dreamweaver, so I can’t comment on it, but I tried FrontPage once several years ago and thought it was junk - terribly messy and poorly organized code. A real treat when someone asks you to fix it….
Hi,this’s raj from encoders.It’s a nice post which goes for a future comment. I love the concept of CSS and a world where everything adheres to a standard. It would certainly make our lives easier - but I doubt we’ll ever see that world.
And as far as using Dreamweaver or a commercial product - well I think designers should use what works best for them.Since I’ve n’t used Dreamweaver,Ican’t comment on it.
raj
encoders
http://www.encoders.co.in
Hi Jennifer, thanks for the regular articles, that I read when the emails come in. I never get involved in religious debates about development tools and standards. I’ve been computer programming for over 20 years and have seen SO many technologies come and go, that I know it really isn’t worth debating which tool, standard, platform etc is better than some other.
For my own professional use, I just evaluate what is available and go ahead with it.
After reading endless articles everywhere about TABLES vs. CSS, I must say it really isn’t an EITHER-OR question, but just two different solutions to two different problems.
For example, I have a web-site, www.RoadRaceResults.com that list results of running races. The site uses CSS for layout but I still use tables as well. If you take a look at this example, this is what tables are intended to do - namely, to display tables that have rows and columns, right?
I have a sincere question - not intended to be sarcastic at all. Am I missing something? Is there any easier, and more importantly, BETTER, way to do this using CSS? I appreciate anyone’s comments.
Wait, I thought it was bright text against a dark background that was supposedly bad, not dark on dark–which, yes, can be bad. But some of the sites I have seen this year listed as “good” have been not so attractive to me. When it comes to dark sites, they can be cool, and they can be a problem. They may be harder to pull off well, granted, but many sites on a plain white background are just the wrong feel for the site and are downright boring. I think it comes down to whether text is more important on the site or visuals. If you have to read a lot, a black background may not be the best choice. But black is beautiful, if done right. The advice should be to understand color, not to say one color is always bad. Just like the history of the United States.
I see in 2007 two things - a.)further advancement in design technology, to make the web even more user friendly, for both casual and business purposes, and b.) more emphasis being placed on the actual information context of web sites. While, like anyone else, I enjoy a good bit of the animation bells and whistles, in the small web design biz I have, it seems more and more potential clients place emphasis on actual info to be projected, and download time, so their customers and web surfers aren’t left sitting 20 or more seconds waiting for animation that is, for a better term, “window dressing”.
Finally, let me say I very much enjoy the articles that you all at About have provided, and I look forward to continuing to receiving them in ‘07!
Michael: yes, bright text on a dark background is hard to read because it’s hard on the eyes. Dark text on a dark background is also hard to read because there isn’t enough contrast. I tend to use that as an example because many designers seem to use it as a way to look “cool”. And they just end up looking unreadable.
while I really like designing pages in CSS instead of tables the biggest problem with CSS deisgn is that to make a page compliant to the American disabilities act standards the page must be fully functional if the user has CSS turned off on their browsers due to whatever needs that have to be accommodated for for their readers and such. thus sadly tables are still necessary for site that need to be ADA compliant (i.e. sites for various organizations that help people with disabilities, or government sites) the best hope is that the standards get updated (they haven’t changed since December 2001) or the assistive technology improves or both, until then I’ll be sticking with tables.
These comments are very interesting to me, I am an Oracle / Delphi developer and our company is moving away from the creating traditional web sites in order to make room for web applications. Although the browser based applications are slowly getting more robust we are now only using browsers for company advertisement. We before you may need to download plugins for extra flavor, a 2-5 mb exe will do the trick for an entire application. A parallel to this process you can see with google earth. I think focusing on browser based application will eventually be a thing of the past. It is an extra layer of software that truley is not necessary. For those of you who are trying to do everything for everybody on any browser good luck because with new versions of browsers comming out all the time it is a constant chase. The power for most browser based application is the backend, but if you just want people to know who you are and what you or your company is doing a 5 - 7 page application is great. But if you are trying to run a business application thru the web it will be a losing battle. We think standards are great CSS or Tables, but standards should reconize a framework for production or cookie cutter approach to development. To many developers think that their first go is to be an artist. Save this for the 5 -7 pages and if it is truely art work you need to capture your audience a maintainable 5-7 pages using a framework makes all of the other discussions academic.
Brian: I think that depends upon how you define “functional”. Table-based layouts are often not linear - and so less-important items (like navigation) are usually first in the table (because they’re at the top or on the left). When a screen reader reads them, they are read first, and can be very tedious to get past.
If you use CSS you can put the navigation links last in your HTML and the sections with content first. This means that when a reader shows up with a non-CSS browser, they will get the content first - not the less important parts of the page.
Sure, the page won’t display like you intended it to, but if they are browsing in a browser without CSS, chances are they couldn’t see what you intended regardless - such as screen readers for visually impaired, they can’t “see” the page at all.
I would argue that a page is functional if it gets across the information you intend it to get across - and that’s what the ADA means. In other words, your Web pages should continue to work for a non-CSS browser, not that they should continue to look and act exactly the same.
Brian - Jennifer is right. ADA (Section 508) compliance doesn’t say it has to be laid out the same, just has to be accessible. An unstyled page is as accessible as any tables-based design, provided you’re not trying to communicate information through CSS (via background images or something like that).
For Firefox users, try CTRL-SHIFT-S (CMD-SHIFT-S on a Mac) and see what the page looks like completely style-free. The info is there, which is the most important thing.
By end of year 2007, popular gurus will collect obvious things and make predictions for 2008
lc: awwww you consider me popular? awwww you consider me a guru?
I think the days of designing sites for the 800 x 600 users will be over soon. I’m already beginning to see more and more content rich websites that are designed for the 1024 users. Also, as a developer/designer/and all around IT guy for my company, I don’t have time to find positioning solutions that really work the same way across all standard browsers. I think tables should stay (minimum use however), but stay until CSS has better positioning options. text-align just doesn’t cut it across all browsers the same way. And… creating a mile long style sheet full of classes and IDs for very small things here and there isn’t an option either. Tables are sometimes easier when you’re on time constraints.
I don’t know why xhtml is not more common.
I try to use it. I created one site using tables and I would love to able to figure out how to get the same effect with CSS. I use CSS for color and font changes, but I have not figured out CSS for positioning.
We all like to use what we know best and resist learning new until we are sure it will be as good or better.
I do enjoy all of your poking and prodding to get developers to produce better sites using xhtml and CSS. I am trying (and trying to learn).
oh thats cool and am sure this can easily be archieve with hardworking and dedicative gurus like you by our side.frankly the choice is cool for me too.
everytime i read one of your articles proclaiming firefix is god, XHTML is the second coming, and only stupid, stubborn, old fashioned, people stuck in the past- will stick to using tables, I roll my eyes so hard they nearly fall out.
Tables are, and will be layout tools. Every single layout i have ever done involving divs either breaks in mozilla, off slightly in IE, takes more time to code the styles in CSS than simplying using a table, and so many other things to list. And then for it to even matter it should all “validate”. And for what? So handicapped people can read my page? A web designer’s goal shouldnt be to be so anal that he wastes hours of billable time on making a “standards” based website when the client could care less if you use divs or tables. Yeah there are exceptions to those rules, some clients WILL want all divs or come to you with a purely CSS based design. But 90% of the clients wont care, as LONG AS THE SITE LOOKS GOOD AND FUNCTIONS AS INTENDS.
CSS is defintely much better and more powerful than font tags and tags and so on, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you use to layout pages. And I dont think it’s good you sit and preach like a preacher to newbies just starting web design that if they dont do purely CSS based layouts, they’re behind in the times.
Shoot, ABOUT.COM DOESNT EVEN VALIDATE. So all i’m saying is jesus, tone down your preaching.
B: thanks for the comments. I definitely don’t mean to sound “preachy” in my posts. However, your comment just reiterates my prediction that people will still be using table-based layouts rather than CSS.
If you’re satisfied with reaching 90% of your audience, then that is definitely good enough. There are designers out there who either strive to higher than 90% or they have a larger audience with accessibility issues - and table based layouts are just not as accessible as CSS.
As for About not validating - I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and I should have had this as one of my predictions): I don’t write the HTML for About. If I did, I would make sure it validated (and used the layout style that helped as close to 100% of my audience as I could).
I noticed most of the predictions and comments were related to the technical aspects of web design, such as vaildation, CSS versus tables, and XHTML. I’d be curious what people predict for the web at a higher level, such as how the web will influence the political landscape, will MySpace retain it’s popularity.
However, on the question of CSS versus tables - these also work very well together. I can’t imaging designing without one or the other.
Thanks for starting the great dialogue. For fun, I threw together a list of predictions.
I predict that in 2007, no matter how many times it is explained, my boss will still have no idea that “web designer” and “web programmer” or “architect” are different things. Resultantly, my company’s sites will either consist of ugly, templatized dynamic content or they will be fairly attractive and utterly useless.
One of the significant changes in 2007 according to the information I have been reading will be an increase in streaming video, podcasting and interactive content.
Good content has always been a vital tool for webmasters in attracting visitors.
With multimedia tools and services becoming more affordable many website owners and marketers will take advantage of this and incorporate it in their sites.