6 ms·

If you're not a designer, it might be hard to see, but the importance of this work is impossible to overstate. In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think a

by dcurtis 14y ago

If you're not a designer, it might be hard to see, but the importance of this work is impossible to overstate. In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web. I have come upon the edge of what CSS is capable of multiple times, especially when building http://dustincurtis.com http://dustincurtis.com, and what happened surprised me: after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. As I realized that the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph, I slowly stopped writing and designing the articles. It was just too much work because the tools to do great custom layouts on the web just don't exist. Compared to what should be possible by now, CSS is pretty primitive. It's a limiting factor in the digitization of traditional media, like magazines. What Adobe is doing here is awesome, and I commend them for pushing forward the status quo.

kirillzubovsky 14y ago
I am with Dustin on this one, but from a different angle. By creating flowable text, Adobe will ridiculously enhance the usefulness of their current publishing tools. A few years back I dabbled into newspaper publishing, and you can't imagine just how frustrating it is to have a beautiful layout in InDesign, which isn't really portable to the web. Having these tools will allow 'normal' people who don't do web to easily create stunning experience; that is a big undertaking!
- DanBC 14y ago
  > to easily create stunning experience I know that I've lost this battle and that I'm in a minority, but to me "stunning experience" comes from the content, and not the presentation.
  - kirillzubovsky 14y ago
    Presentation without content isn't much, but content without presentation isn't either. When you are competing for users' attention, having an option to present the content in a memorable and outspoken way is quite important. It's much like code, no one cares what your backend looks like, if users can't work with your apps.
  - whatusername 14y ago
    Really? I'm really really struggling to find any human experience that is not improved by the "presentation". Can you name a single one that is wholly about the content and derives no value from the 'presentation'? (For any of the 5 senses?). To my mind there is basic quadrant setup: * Low Content and Low Presentation == Worthless Junk * Low Content and High Presentation == Useless Fluff, Polished Turds * High Content and Low Presentation == Useful but Boring and hard to understand * High Content and High Presentation == Life Changing Content. Valuable AND easy to grok. For a HN related example -- Assuming you don't use Python -- do you format/indent your code in any way? That's "Presentation" that clearly adds value to the content.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      Books. Books don't need sound and video and special effects and gradients and rounded corners and 8 different fonts and mouse-over effects and transitions and etc. You get one font for 40,000 words. You get justification, and paragraphs, and if you're lucky a nice font. An online example would be "Readbility" - that turns weirdly presented text into a very simple presentation. I accept that it's a carefully chosen well designed presentation, but the simplicity is key to allowing access to the information. See also all the various HN redesigns. HN is presentationally fairly simple. Almost all the redesigns add more stuff, but decrease usability, and distract from the actual content. > That's "Presentation" that clearly adds value to the content. I'm not saying presentation is pointless. But, if we're doing either / or, would you rather have bug free code with no indentation or buggy code with lovely formatting?
      - hieronymusN 14y ago
        Books are designed. Lots of consideration is put into the typography, layout, rhythm and form of printed books, and those design choices stretch back over a hundred years. There is much more at play than "justification, and paragraphs, and if you're lucky a nice font." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestaltung/dp/3721201450 http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestal... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St...
gbog 14y ago
> the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph To me, this looks like the most INsane way to build a layout. What is wrong with a "let browsers and users choose their font size, their text widht, etc."? For instance, both my wife and I are Kindle users, we have different font size, the text reflows almost always correctly, and who prefers bigger font has bigger font. My father is also a Kindle user and use an even bigger font because of his age. Soon he will have to read book on this device, because all fixed-font books will be too small for him.
- EmilStenstrom 14y ago
  There are two big "design movements" on the web, and dustin represents one end of the spectrum. His side argues that great design makes things better, and that we all should put more time into design. The other side says "design is not needed", and that each user can manage their design settings themselves. These are the people that pushed for RSS and Responsive design, and that see design as more of an optional addon. None of the sides are always correct.
  - idan 14y ago
    This is a terrible representation of the issue. In the end, designing for the web is designing for a lack of control. I can't control your screen geometry, display technology, browser compliance, fonts, and more. There is no fixed canvas like I had in print. This isn't a limitation, this is simply the medium. Designing for this medium means that you must take your canonical ideal and figure out how it would be transformed under different stresses: tiny screens with partial user attention, big screens viewed from couch distance, monochrome screens which don't refresh quickly, modern browsers with fast javascript, and old broken browsers. Great design does make things better, but it isn't about pushing the design decisions onto the user. There's no argument that Dustin produces beautiful works of art, but designing with manual layout of the kind he describes is designing against the grain of the medium. CSS has limitations, but so does print. Design is what you accomplish within those limitations, and how you go about accomplishing it in a timeframe that allows you to complete your project and make a living.
thristian 14y ago
> after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. Isn't that what always happens? That's one of the reasons designs from different eras look different: not just that fashions change, but that the output technology changes and allows a different set of design choices. No matter how much somebody in the 1940s might have wished to set some type a smidgeon wider or narrower, that just wasn't possible until the advent of phototypesetting in the 60s, and 1940s designers would have subconsciously altered their designs to fit within the limitations of their technology.
- dcurtis 14y ago
  At the fringes of every fashion era, there have been things that've peeked out into the future and tried to push things forward. As a designer, if you aren't constantly trying to build stuff that's better than what other people think is currently possible, then you may have just become a cog in a machine.
qznc 14y ago
I agree that this technology is absolutely necessary for certain use cases. However, this will certainly be abused by lots of people to create "an amazing experience online", with the effect that texts become harder to read.
nostromo 14y ago
> In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web. I believe that's the purpose of this W3C Candidate Recommendation: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ I agree that it seems silly that we still don't have columns in html, especially considering how wide monitors have gotten. However, I'm not Adobe has the answer.
- diminish 14y ago
  CSS column flow will help a lot. However I hope print-minded-fixed designers will not end up flooding the net with rigid fixed-width designs mainly accessibility, edit ability, customisability is important in the word of flexible contents. papers or older forms of fixed rigid tech mediums have so many drawbacks, which ended up being a long exploitation area for designer hacks. in short I am for css-reflowing columns but i am against paper.

by dcurtis 14y ago

kirillzubovsky 14y ago

I am with Dustin on this one, but from a different angle. By creating flowable text, Adobe will ridiculously enhance the usefulness of their current publishing tools. A few years back I dabbled into newspaper publishing, and you can't imagine just how frustrating it is to have a beautiful layout in InDesign, which isn't really portable to the web. Having these tools will allow 'normal' people who don't do web to easily create stunning experience; that is a big undertaking!

DanBC 14y ago
> to easily create stunning experience I know that I've lost this battle and that I'm in a minority, but to me "stunning experience" comes from the content, and not the presentation.
- kirillzubovsky 14y ago
  Presentation without content isn't much, but content without presentation isn't either. When you are competing for users' attention, having an option to present the content in a memorable and outspoken way is quite important. It's much like code, no one cares what your backend looks like, if users can't work with your apps.
- whatusername 14y ago
  Really? I'm really really struggling to find any human experience that is not improved by the "presentation". Can you name a single one that is wholly about the content and derives no value from the 'presentation'? (For any of the 5 senses?). To my mind there is basic quadrant setup: * Low Content and Low Presentation == Worthless Junk * Low Content and High Presentation == Useless Fluff, Polished Turds * High Content and Low Presentation == Useful but Boring and hard to understand * High Content and High Presentation == Life Changing Content. Valuable AND easy to grok. For a HN related example -- Assuming you don't use Python -- do you format/indent your code in any way? That's "Presentation" that clearly adds value to the content.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Books. Books don't need sound and video and special effects and gradients and rounded corners and 8 different fonts and mouse-over effects and transitions and etc. You get one font for 40,000 words. You get justification, and paragraphs, and if you're lucky a nice font. An online example would be "Readbility" - that turns weirdly presented text into a very simple presentation. I accept that it's a carefully chosen well designed presentation, but the simplicity is key to allowing access to the information. See also all the various HN redesigns. HN is presentationally fairly simple. Almost all the redesigns add more stuff, but decrease usability, and distract from the actual content. > That's "Presentation" that clearly adds value to the content. I'm not saying presentation is pointless. But, if we're doing either / or, would you rather have bug free code with no indentation or buggy code with lovely formatting?
    - hieronymusN 14y ago
      Books are designed. Lots of consideration is put into the typography, layout, rhythm and form of printed books, and those design choices stretch back over a hundred years. There is much more at play than "justification, and paragraphs, and if you're lucky a nice font." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Tschichold http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestaltung/dp/3721201450 http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Graphic-Systeme-Visuele-Gestal... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_St...

gbog 14y ago

> the only sane way to build the layouts was to absolutely/manually position every paragraph To me, this looks like the most INsane way to build a layout. What is wrong with a "let browsers and users choose their font size, their text widht, etc."? For instance, both my wife and I are Kindle users, we have different font size, the text reflows almost always correctly, and who prefers bigger font has bigger font. My father is also a Kindle user and use an even bigger font because of his age. Soon he will have to read book on this device, because all fixed-font books will be too small for him.

EmilStenstrom 14y ago
There are two big "design movements" on the web, and dustin represents one end of the spectrum. His side argues that great design makes things better, and that we all should put more time into design. The other side says "design is not needed", and that each user can manage their design settings themselves. These are the people that pushed for RSS and Responsive design, and that see design as more of an optional addon. None of the sides are always correct.
- idan 14y ago
  This is a terrible representation of the issue. In the end, designing for the web is designing for a lack of control. I can't control your screen geometry, display technology, browser compliance, fonts, and more. There is no fixed canvas like I had in print. This isn't a limitation, this is simply the medium. Designing for this medium means that you must take your canonical ideal and figure out how it would be transformed under different stresses: tiny screens with partial user attention, big screens viewed from couch distance, monochrome screens which don't refresh quickly, modern browsers with fast javascript, and old broken browsers. Great design does make things better, but it isn't about pushing the design decisions onto the user. There's no argument that Dustin produces beautiful works of art, but designing with manual layout of the kind he describes is designing against the grain of the medium. CSS has limitations, but so does print. Design is what you accomplish within those limitations, and how you go about accomplishing it in a timeframe that allows you to complete your project and make a living.

thristian 14y ago

> after a while, I noticed that I had started to subconsciously alter my designs to fit within the limitations of the display technology. Isn't that what always happens? That's one of the reasons designs from different eras look different: not just that fashions change, but that the output technology changes and allows a different set of design choices. No matter how much somebody in the 1940s might have wished to set some type a smidgeon wider or narrower, that just wasn't possible until the advent of phototypesetting in the 60s, and 1940s designers would have subconsciously altered their designs to fit within the limitations of their technology.

dcurtis 14y ago
At the fringes of every fashion era, there have been things that've peeked out into the future and tried to push things forward. As a designer, if you aren't constantly trying to build stuff that's better than what other people think is currently possible, then you may have just become a cog in a machine.

qznc 14y ago

I agree that this technology is absolutely necessary for certain use cases. However, this will certainly be abused by lots of people to create "an amazing experience online", with the effect that texts become harder to read.

nostromo 14y ago

> In 10 years, we'll look back on today and think about how barbaric and stupid it was that we didn't have re-flowable text in multi-box CSS layouts or absolute control of typefaces on the web. I believe that's the purpose of this W3C Candidate Recommendation: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ I agree that it seems silly that we still don't have columns in html, especially considering how wide monitors have gotten. However, I'm not Adobe has the answer.

diminish 14y ago
CSS column flow will help a lot. However I hope print-minded-fixed designers will not end up flooding the net with rigid fixed-width designs mainly accessibility, edit ability, customisability is important in the word of flexible contents. papers or older forms of fixed rigid tech mediums have so many drawbacks, which ended up being a long exploitation area for designer hacks. in short I am for css-reflowing columns but i am against paper.