I can't believe it! 5. He's 5 and going to school... where did my goony little boy go who used to flap his arms when he got excited? How is it that the older you get, the faster time goes by? What the hell is that all about?

Anyway, this is quintessential Donovan. Typical goofy face while getting his picture taken. What a ham. So far he loves school. I know it's only Kindergarten, but his teacher is nice, even if she does refer to herself in the first-person all the time. Which, if I recall correctly, didn't do Bob Dole any favors. This picture was on the front page of the Bradford Era, on Tuesday, August 29th 2006.

So Dylan has lost his daytime playmate, and has officially glommed onto Mommy as the next greatest entertainment device. He was upset that he didn't get to ride the bus with big brother. Hehehe... Wait a while buddy, you won't wait till summer vacation too....

I've heard about Burning Man since I was about 24 years when I worked with Matto at Pro Photo Supply, but it seems the time has come that it is entirely too main-stream. I have never been. About 8 years ago or so I wanted to go, but I am not of that scene really. Never was, never will be. I freely admit it. It looks like a wild as hell desert party with a bunch of really crazy freakin people. But how far is it from where it started? Maybe no one cares, maybe they all just figure Hey! The more , the merrier.

I received this email from the away network:

Burning Man—part carnival, part art event, part party, purely counter-culture—is an impossible-to-encapsulate event, which takes place annually (August 28 to September 4, in 2006) in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Organizers describe the event as an "experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression and radical self-reliance." The free-flowing mayhem culminates in the immolation of a massive human figure, hence the name.

"...immolation of a massive human figure,..." WTF is that? Who in the hell wrote that crap? Some 20-something communications grad, in his first job out of college who knows nothing of the community and culture surrounding the event? That's what it sounds like to me. Compare that description to what is posted on the Burning Man website.

Naturally I have found plenty of information to lead me to believe it, A). will never die, or B). it sucks and should be stopped. The reality seems to be that no matter how much it is advertised, simply having 36,500 people descend onto Black Rock City every year is enough for the planners/organizers and they are still out to have a good time. Which, if you look at the pictures, they indeed do. I wonder how much is spent on this event though? The tickets are $350 bucks a pop!

I've always found this event intriguing, and it always cracks me up to get advertisements for it. I sorta liken it to the 55 year old yuppie CEOs that all ran out and bought Harley's because they were coooool. They were right about half of it, the Harley's are cool.

I just finished watching Invincible with Mark Wahlberg. First off, this is a great movie and I highly recommend anyone to see it. It's PG, so take the kids and have a good time. Wahlberg does a great job, and for the most part it is an accurate representation of Papale and his time spent with the Eagles.

It started me thinking though, some of the music really took me back to when I was kid. Jim Croce's I Got a Name opens the movie, and I started thinking about what my kids will listen to when they are in their 30's and go, "damn! This reminds me of when I was kid." It's funny, because I don't even remember being interested in music at all until after the 3rd grade, and my brother started listening to AC/DC (the real AC/DC too, before Bon Scott died) while we lived in Florida. We lived in this big-damn housing development called The Meadows, in Sarasota - cracks me, they even have a website now. Hell, here's our old freakin house in fact. Not exactly, but we lived on Ringwood Meadows, in a white house, tile roof - okay that's 90% of Florida. Just look at the damned map, okay?

Still, I will be interested in what my boys will remember that I listened to all of the time when they were growing up. Will it be David Gray, Nickleback, Sting, or something else entirely? Who knows. I'm just glad I'm past the butt-rock stage of musical evolution, so I won't have to be remembered as a Def Leopard, big hair-band fan....

Remember, information is not knowledge; knowledge is not wisdom; wisdom is not truth; truth is not beauty; beauty is not love; love is not music; music is the best.
Frank Zappa

I finally have my critique site up, and ready for submissions. .crit is well on its way out of beta. Okay, maybe that's a stretch - but it's up and running.

For a bit of background on what the site is and what it's all about, .crit is a web site critique site for folks who design and develop sites for any reason and want honest, no holds barred, I'm not your Mother feedback on the site design, functionality, UI, balance, etc.... Why? Simple. How many times have you made something and received useless feedback base don only someones opinion? I don't like it. It sucks. I'm an idiot and I have the vocabulary of a dim-witted field mouse. You know what I mean. Opinions do have their place and can be valuable, but generally if you are in search of a response, something construction is more desirable than just a blank stare and a "duhhhh" response. Enter .crit. The tool to combat intarweb-tards everywhere.

I am currently working on the sample critique, and should have that done fairly soon. I am working hard and staying up way too late - so, I guess I really don't have an excuse. Right? So saunter on over to dotcrit.com, and check it out.

This is a one-step tutorial.

adambartos.com

This website is by far, hands down, the worst site I have seen in months for a photographer - or anyone else for that matter. Nothing shows on the home page except a Grey Poupon Yellow screen with some text, once you click on a link you have to assume something is happening and alas it is. Hey knucklehead! Ever heard of Flash Development? Then surely you must know what a progress bar is? Ahh... no. This is the best use of full-browser Flash I have ever seen.... Yeah... and here come the pink monkies....

This is why you still read headlines - "Flash - 99% bad". There are so many how-to, and Dummies for Dummies books available that anyone tosser with a credit card can attempt to pass themselves off as a professional in the intarweb world of fun. It's like a bar full of drunken carnies, and they all seem to look just like Fortune 500 CEOs.

George Slade sums it up quite nicely with his review of the book, Boulevard:

"Boulevard is a triumph of diffidence, a tour de force of the blase, a proclamation that ungainly pictures of unspectacular landscapes can be made in nearly any city one chooses"

At least he's consistent right? The website is a direct reflection of his latest book.

This is still the catch phrase of the year - Web Standards. Everyone is talking about it, lots of folks are developing to this ideology - and yet, why is it so hard to do? You can't have an article, blog post or discussion about Standards or Tableless Design without some Standardista or Web Relic spouting irrational emotions about how their way is the best. In the not too distant past, Andy Clarke was quoted as saying:

"Those people still delivering nested table layout, spacer gifs or ignoring accessibility can no longer call themselves web professionals."

As inflammatory, elitist, and narrow minded as this may seem from an initial pass, it really isn't. Point in fact - he's right. If you really delve deep into what that statement means, you will quickly see that it's simple. If you develop, design, post, or conjure a website into being all the while ignoring the basic needs of users who navigate the web, you are not a professional - that is to say you are not acting in a professional manner. My job as a Web Designer is to consider the user when creating a site. Not to consider what my own selfish desires are in order to get the job done quickly, or in the easiest way possible to make more money or because I don't want to do it. Both of which are poor excuses, and completely invalid.

The Easy Way

The list is long, the list is varied. Big name corporations are on this list, so are one-man-shops. I would wager that at least 60% of all websites in existence suffer from this, if not far more. Sorry, I'm trying to be a bit generous. So what is the easy way? Simple. Slap up a bunch of pages with 15 nested tables, no alt text on any of the images, incomplete or inaccurate tab ordering on forms, no abbr tags when you include acronyms in text, yada yada yada. This is indeed the easy way. We're all guilty of it at one time or another. What counts in the end is that you try to do something about it. You can create sites much faster this way, especially if you are unfamiliar with CSS structuring. It takes effort to learn new things, but the pay-off is worth it.

There is also a gray area to this - as there always is. There was a trend for a while when CSS starting to become really popular for folks to use classes like body-bold-blue, or body-bold. I can hang my head in shame and say that I have been guilty of this. It's crap, and I freely admit it. What good is it to use this over the <b>or <strong> tag? If you're making a sub heading, why not use an h3, and give it a class of subheading, and style that class with CSS. That gives the style meaning - and starts you along the road of Semantics.

The Hard Way

You knew it had to come. Let the keywords and catch-phrases fly! Tableless design, accessibility, CSS, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, I could go on for miles. But you get the idea.

The first thing to do is ditch the table to wrap your page layout with. The ditch the table that is inside the wrapper table. Okay, so you have a table for the header, and one for the menu, then another for the body area with 2 columns and yet another table for the footer. So right of the bat,  you can cut your code down by what? 30 tags? Consider if you have a basic table, with 5 rows and 1 columns, that's 14 tags per table. Now multiply that by 4 or five tables and you have a mess on your hands.

Tables are for tablature data - not layout.

It's a daunting task. I know. It wasn't that long ago that I started attacking my work in earnest, actively removing table based layout and replacing it with CSS based design. It was a pain in the arse. And at times, still sends me screaming to the vending machine for another Mt. Dew. You know what? It's worth it. Why?

• Easier to update layout
• much lower code to content ration (this gets you smaller files, faster load times and lower bandwidth bills)
• Easier for Spiders to crawl
• Semantic structure gets you better page ranking
• ability to quickly change format to be accessed by devices other than web browsers (screen readers, mobile devices)
• More Accessible

That's a good place to start. Sounds good doesn't it? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to spend just a few day updating a design rather than weeks wading through data trying to change pages form the old to the new? Then having to go back and clean up the parts you goofed up or forgot.

As a side note: I just about always break this rule of thumb for forms. I tend to employ tables for form layout since it makes more sense, resulting in a more usable form with far less time spent. I have toiled for days working on a good model for a CSS based form, and in the end it just isn't worth the trouble. Unless you only have 4 items in a forms, I would use a table to hold it all together, and spend your time working on something more valuable.

Where to start

Start simple.
If you are designing a new layout for a huge site, with tomes of data and a decade of Legacy Data and static pages, going whole hog for the CSS based layout gusto may wind you up in the poor house. Especially if you are on a tight deadline. Start with the small projects, and as you become more comfortable, go bigger. Look at lots of examples and see how folks are conquering problems. You will always have to use hacks to overcome the fact that non of the browsers render anything the same way. They are all different with their own unique quirks.

Look at other sites.
Poke around the web and see what other folks are doing with tableless design, and how they tamed the beast. There is a myriad of information available to  find information and examples. The British Secret Service did a great job on their site.

There is an endless supply of excellent websites to look at as well as plethora of resources all aimed at getting you on board and up-to-speed quickly. We may be a pushy group, trying to cram standards down the throat of every would-be designer/developer - but what you can't say is that there isn't enough information that is FREE on the web.

References like:

• A List Apart
• Molly  Holzschlag
• The Web Standards Project
• Eric Meyer
• W3C Sites - List of compliant websites
• Quirks mode CSS Hacks
  
• Tantek Celics Box Model Hack
• Digital Web - Keep it Simple
  

are all excellent places to start. Check out my new site too, perubique.com, and feel free to swipe the CSS, I use Nifty Corners and some other cool JavaScript functions, like LiteBox and submodal windows too.