Quoted-Printable

This site’s design (Scribbish) looks much better at a width of 900px. Which violates the minimum screen resolution guidelines I’ve been employing since 1999. But no more! I’ve decided that I just don’t give a shit about people with screen resolutions less than 1024×768px. I mean, come on. This is the future.

I hereby declare 1024×768 to be the new minimum. Tell your friends.

I’m not alone here. I’ve noticed more and more sites doing this, especially those that cater to an audience of programmers and other tech-minded individuals. One that comes immediately to mind is InfoQ. There are others. I’ve seen them. I just can’t remember any of them right now.

Cameron Moll has touched on this topic recently.

Let’s face it: The jump from developing for 800×600 to 1024×n is inevitable; not only inevitable, but just around the corner, too.

See Optimal width for 1024px resolution for his thoughts on what the new perfect width should be.

Even Jakob Nielsen is an advocate of going wide, and who are we to argue with the so-called “usability Pope” (He displays that quote on his homepage. Really. Also note that his photo is the most prominent thing on the page. And there’s a link right under it pointing out the fact that high-resolution photos are available for download, of which this one is my favorite, but of course, there are several).

Anyway, here’s his current resolution recommendation

Optimize for 1024×768, which is currently the most widely used screen size. Of course, the general guideline is to optimize for your target audience’s most common resolution, so the size will change in the future. It might even be a different size now, if, say, you’re designing an intranet for a company that gives all employees big monitors.

See his Alertbox writeup, Screen Resolution and Page Layout for the full report.

So, yeah. Quoted-Printable is now among the wide. And it looks so much better. Especially the code sections with their pretty syntax coloring. Wouldn’t you agree? The changes to Scribbish are in svn. See the download page for instructions on checking it out.

Now that I wear the programmer hat more often, I sometimes forget that I’m an accomplished HTML/CSS designer. I was pleased to learn that I rank at least a ‘level 5’ in both my HTML and CSS knowledge, according to Roger Johansson and Emil Stenstrom

Most standards aware web professionals can be found here. These people tend to think about structure and semantics first and presentation later. Strict doctypes are generally used at this level to encourage the separation of semantic and presentational markup. Whether the markup language is HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0 is less important to many. In fact, some people at Level 5 are questioning the use of XHTML. Level 5 people tend to get into endless discussions about tiny markup details. They can waste hours thinking about class names or reorganizing their HTML and CSS files to make their code look pretty.

Whether you like it or not, when you’re designing web applications, you have to write a lot of html. Sometimes I work with pure-bred programmers who couldn’t write a little semantic html to save their lives. Sure, Rails lessens the burden with its templates, layouts, and helpers, but all this assistance still won’t save you from having to know what you’re doing.

HTML is the new interface language for today’s applications (does the term ‘weblication’ exist yet? or is that too lame? Definitely too lame…). And what good is HTML without CSS to make it look pretty? When you consider companies like 37Signals, it’s important to realize that a large part of their success owes not only to their penchant for making simple software, but to making simple software that looks good. What I’m saying is that It’s not just about the language or the framework—truly great web applications are a lot more than just code.