Rael Dornfest revisits, and endorses Mozilla Firebird, (for non-Mac users) and Mozilla Thunderbird for everyone.

I’ve always advocated the use of liquid design, but had trouble finding good examples. Liquid design, from a user’s perspective, can be a great thing. I love being able to resize my browser window and have a site’s contents nicely reflow to fit. In many cases, maximizing the browser window and cranking up the text size makes content-heavy sites more convenient to read. It’s a design challenge, to be sure, especially with screen resolutions really getting up there. Besides, it’s much easier to just lock everything in to some specific width. Keeps those pesky users from messing up the design. Anyway, Simon Willison points out a good example in the Rocky Mountain Harley-Davidson site.

Clay Shirky on Wikis, Graffiti, and Process:

Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. When I was CTO of a web design firm, I noticed in staff meetings that we only ever talked about process when we were avoiding talking about people. “We need a process to ensure that the client does not get half-finished design sketches” is code for “Greg fucked up.” The problem, of course, is that much of this process nevertheless gets put in place, meaning that an organization slowly forms around avoiding the dumbest behaviors of its mediocre employees, resulting in layers of gunk that keep its best employees from doing interesting work, because they too have to sign The Form Designed to Keep You From Doing The Stupid Thing That One Guy Did Three Years Ago.

Fullasagoog posts a Flash MX 2004 “interactive screenshot.” from Flash Guru

I’m not really sure what all the hubbub is about

There’s been a spate of posts recently suggesting something that I believe will one day be recognized as the beginning of something. I’m talking about the death of email. Folks like Chris Pirillo and others are suggesting that RSS feeds will replace email newsletters in the not to distant future. Once the RSS aggregators get over being too geek-centric, this could very likely happen.

The Editor and Publisher article, With E-mail Dying, RSS Offers Alternative, has this to say…

Any e-mail publisher with a survival instinct should be publishing RSS feeds of the content that it currently e-mails. “It’s only a matter of time before e-mail newsletters go the way of the dinosaur,”

If you have any interest at all in understanding or implementing web standards within your organization, read Standards: Designing For the Future.

Bottom line is - there are still too many people who only understand the old school methods of web design, and only when these people can get enthusiastic about adopting new methods will we be delivered to the promised land of perfect mark-up.

From Jason Kottke in a post on stop design’s site:

…semantics with regard to web design means that if you have a paragraph, surround it with

tags; if you’ve got a article title (or something), use an

tag; and if you have a list of items, use

or
with
1. tags instead of separating them with breaks or using
   s. As much as possible, the tags surrounding the content of a document should describe what that content is and/or what it’s for.

Kottke.org on the complimentary, but not necessarily interdependant concepts of XHTML/CSS design and semantically correct markup:

Coding web documents in valid XHTML doesn’t make them semantically useful nor does coding semantically correct documents mean the documents are standards-compliant; they are two distinct things but a powerful combination. As web designers, we need to be aware of what we’re getting with standards compliancy and semantically rich documents and that one does not necessarily lead to the other. More importantly, we need evangelize effectively to clients and budding XHTML coders & web designers, telling them precisely what’s so great about making sites standards-compliant and semantically useful and therefore worth spending money to redesign a site or time to learn valid XHTML/CSS.

Okay, this I like: A forum where anyone can ask an information design question and very likely have it answered by Mr. Tufte himself. See Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

The best new feature of Nick Bradbury’s excellent aggregator, FeedDemon Beta 4 isn’t a feature at all. He simply renamed “Listings” to “Channel Groups.” Much better. Oh, and there are a few nifty new features also.