Is :: Dead?

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on September 20th, 2006.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

http://fadtastic.net/

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A little bit of mid-week nostalgia and fun.

Way back in the early days of fad, I called for readers to search for :: (double colons)

I challenge those readers with 5 minutes spare time to try to find an example of double colons used in a modern website. 10 FadPoints for any good spots.

Or just simply sound off any opinions you have on this (dead?) trend. Would you use them now?

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Aparently sombody still uses them.. after reading your article, i stumbled upon this site..
http://community.livejournal.com/bestoffreecycle/

bryan
September 20th, 2006
#

Hilarious - I can’t believe I forgot about this. Hopefully overuse of random characters in titles will be something we don’t repeat in the future.

P.J. Onori
September 20th, 2006
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Good spot, Bryan. 10 FadPoints are coming your way… ;)

Andrew Faulkner
September 20th, 2006
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You almost would have been able to use my site. I went to get my Doing Business As for my very, very small freelance graphic design gig and wanted to call the company cleave*design but Georgia wouldln’t take the “*” - so I then tried to do cleave::design but they wouldn’t allow that either.

Good thing…I guess.

Adam Walker Cleaveland
September 20th, 2006
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There also used to be a lot of use of | to separate link items. To know why this is bad, try using a screen reader. It reads “vertical bar”. In the case of :: they would read “colon colon”. Not good.

So the first potential reason is because designers are becoming more aware of accessibility issues.

The second is that they are really a presentational delineator put into the actual text. It’s like putting a decorative image in as an and not as a CSS background. Now that CSS is well supported (and people have a better understanding of semantics) you can use proper lists to mark up things that would have formerly been done with :: or | separators.

Megan
September 20th, 2006
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That doesn’t make sense because the comment form cut out my img tag. So it should read “decorative image in with an image tag instead of with css” Sorry, first comment here :)

Megan
September 20th, 2006
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Here’s an example I oddly enough happen to have open right now:

http://operawiki.info/ (in the title tag)

Sorry for the multiple comments :)

Megan
September 20th, 2006
#

Megan,

Great insights there. I think the vertical bar issue started as the W3C asked for ‘no blank spaces between links’ or something of the sort. So people may have started this to overcome that rule.

Semantics/Accessibility has helped to fade this ‘habit’ out now though.

Great example there at OperaWiki. And welcome to fadtastic.

Andrew Faulkner
September 20th, 2006
#

Ummm….so, I just saw Megan’s comment about the :: in the title bar and I thought to myself…shoot, I’ve seen that:

My design site. In the title bar.

Shoot.

Adam Walker Cleaveland
September 21st, 2006
#

Adam,

Are you proud of it?

Andrew Faulkner
September 22nd, 2006
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Umm, I posted the comment to the wrong post, sorry. Anyhow, here’s a link to a site that *still* uses those.

http://www.mt.com.mk/eng/