first_page

Bryan’s Biggest Known Technical Misses

My biggest known miss in the world of Web information design is my lack of incorporating XML into my data management scenarios back in my classic days of COM and ASP (around 2001 or 2002—after MSXML was born). Instead of playing a waiting game for XHTML support in the popular Web browsers, I should have seen that server-side XML transformations could have taken place to eliminate the need for looping through text files procedurally and writing to disk. I would have far more XSLT experience by now that might have been… well… interesting…

My biggest known miss in the world of Web visual design is my lack of understanding of the unordered list (ul) as the replacement for the deprecated menu element. Evidence of this ignorance can be seen in my Blog post “Zen in the Art of CSS.” While it is true that div elements are designed to stack vertically, I was completely ignorant of the horizontal use of li elements. An examination of the source code of the home page at A List Apart slaps me right in the face.

With regard to Web visual design—that kind of design that people we know as designers recognize—I’m sure we could find more misses. There is ample room for improvement and I look forward to getting all of this data management stuff under control to concentrate on human-machine interface design skills. I’ve been whining about this for years as documented in “2000: Design Diary” and “1998: Design Diary.”

rasx()