Weekly Thought: Web Designers Wishlist

Posted by Ezekiel Bruni on May 24th, 2007.

Ezekiel Bruni is a seventeen-year old Canadian web designer, currently located in Mexico. Aside from design, he likes books, poetry, music, and good food.

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May 20th, 2007, I turned eighteen. I suppose we all have things that we wish for on our birthdays. I was going through my list when I realised that at least half the things I wish for are web design related. So just for the fun of it, I’ve listed a few of the most important ones here for you (not in order of importance).

The List

Adobe Creative Suite CS3 on Linux - Think of it now, the best of the design industry on a speedy and secure operating system. I know that already exists for Mac users, but for people that prefer Linux (or that just don’t have enough cash for a Mac), it would be nice to have these programs.What about the Open Source alternatives?The GIMP’s major flaw (in my own opinion) is that it was designed by programmers, not artists/designers. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some great stuff made with the GIMP, but I personally think it lacks in the usability department. Not to mention it’s very, very bad type support. But all the same, props to the guys who put their time into it.
As for Inkscape, Scribus, and other software alternatives to the CS3 suite, well, I can’t wait to see what they come up with, but it’s clear that Adobe has the cutting edge.
text-align-vertical: center; - This is a CSS property that I’d really like to see. Who wouldn’t want an easy way to vertically center the content of a div, or just about any other block level element for that matter?

font: url(path/to/font.ttf); - Recently, typography has become more and more important to me. As I learn more about it, the more frustrated I become at the lack of good typography support in modern browsers. SIFR is nice, alright, but we shouldn’t have to rely on Javascript and Flash for something that should be built into our browsers.

height: fill-available; - And lastly, another inventive CSS property. This one would simplify so many layouts, remove the need to use background images as faux columns, and much more.

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Alright, I know my list was rather short, but I’ll bet you guys can think of plenty more. Help me add to the list.

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text-align-vertical??? I think what you really want is vertical-align to work on more than just table cells.

and for font, you want CSS3 specification for @font-face (see here)

Paul Armstrong
May 24th, 2007
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Amen to the font embedding! And I want the 6 months of my life back that I’ve cumulatively spent dealing with “height” issues!

Better CSS Support in general is probably the single biggest “wish list” item I have. Back end development languages can now do more than ever, more easily than ever. Functionally, I’ve been able to do whatever I could imagine design-wise with PhotoShop for years (although productivity/usability and performance enhancements along the way are always good).

But CSS support…I’m totally tired of the hacks and workarounds and cross browser issues and tricks that it takes to create a beautiful design that degrades gracefully! While CSS has done wonders for maintainability, bandwidth consumption, and SEO/semantic markup, it still feels like a dull blade for design.

Standardistas make the case for “forward compatibility” but look what happened to so many sites when IE 7 came out! I know that’s a MS issue, not a “standards” issue, but I’m sick and tired of it nonetheless. Old table-based layouts that I did in the late 90s still seem more “solid” than some of the CSS ones I did 2 years ago. I know there are CSS experts making standards “work” …with the resources of a large corporation. But my main point here is that it should not be so hard.

If anything I think we can at least bank on the fact that this industry changes rapidly and it will certainly get better. I for one am really looking forward to that day!

Rachel
May 24th, 2007
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The text-align-vertical thing mostly already exists, in the form of “display: table-cell; vertical-align: middle;”. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer (7 and below) don’t yet support display: table-cell, and for some reason the IE developers don’t seem to think it’s a high priority, from what I’ve gathered.

I’d love for Internet Explorer to support display:table-cell and the other table values, :before and :after pseudo-elements (and, once the relevant CSS 3 specifications make it to Candidate Recommendation stage, for all major browsers to support the full CSS 3 pseudo-element model with ::inside and ::outside included), and the “inherit” value for all properties (which the IE team also doesn’t seem to think is a high priority). But near the top of my priority list is getting rid of the hasLayout model in favor of the standard block formatting context model, which the IE developers actually do agree is a high priority. hasLayout is responsible for a huge portion of the rendering inconsistencies you see in IE, since in a lot of ways it’s like IE is using two separate layout engines depending on whether or not the element has layout.

I definitely agree that we need a Photoshop for Linux, as the Gimp just doesn’t cut it. My biggest problem with the Gimp is that you can’t apply layer effects that may later be adjusted like you can in Photoshop. I’m not a “natural” when it comes to design work; I have to tweak stuff until it’s right, and the Gimp makes tweaking a lot more of a hassle than it should be. I normally run Photoshop in Wine, although every so often (as is the case right now) some Wine update causes Photoshop to stop functioning correctly, and I have to either downgrade or use my Windows laptop until a fix comes out.

David Hammond
May 24th, 2007
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Rachel: It might please you to know that the Internet Explorer development team plans to put a safeguard against CSS breakage in the next version of Internet Explorer. It will save the current state of the rendering engine as a kind of “quirks mode 2″ that all sites will use by default. You may opt in to the new CSS improvements by using some sort of flag (probably a special type of comment, similar to conditional comments). If you don’t include that flag, then your site that works in IE 7 should work in IE.next without any fixes needed.

One thing to look out for though: Be careful with conditional comments that don’t include IE > 7. If you don’t opt in to the CSS improvements, then IE.next will need all of the same hacks you’re giving to IE 7. Rather than using the “lte IE 7″ condition, you should use just “IE”, and rather than the “IE 7″ condition, you should use “gte IE 7″.

David Hammond
May 24th, 2007
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I would love to have CSS Rounded Corners

Navdeep
May 24th, 2007
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My wish list is for CSS3 to be released and supported by all browsers. Border-radius, border-image, drop shadows, improved selectors, opacity…

…then again, that might make my job so easy, I get bored.

NatalieMac
May 24th, 2007
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Ahhh, gotta love that font property. If only, if only…

I’d really like to use some different fonts for headers and whatnot. Arial, Georgia, and Tahoma get boring after a while.

Lara
May 25th, 2007
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“…As for Inkscape, Scribus, and other software alternatives to the CS3 suite..”

I don’t think Inkscape or Scribus are alternatives to the entire CS3 suite but infact are alternatives to Illustrator only. But I completely agree that Linux needs Photoshop and possibly the entire CS3 suite. The others are still lacking in many ways :(.

Rohit
May 25th, 2007
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I’d love css tag for 100% vertical size. I know you can hack it. It should be simple. And for clients to not ask for logo reflections.

reid
May 25th, 2007
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@Rohit

I guess I should have clarified… “Replacements for other products in the CS3 suite” might have been better.

Scribus is seen as a replacement for InDesign though, not Illustrator.

Ezekiel Bruni
May 25th, 2007
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I must agree to all of these, although, I’m not as much of a fan of Linux but the other three tags are huge. Would love them, but of course, you know it will be years before such items would be supported if they were ever created.

Wes Linda
May 31st, 2007
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A good working IEX would be nice, and force all older version user to upgrade.

YPM
June 5th, 2007
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try Xara X as an alternative to Illustrator. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

thinsoldier
June 7th, 2007
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