Please

Please

I smell a Zeldman

19 April 2004
Filed under Text, The Interweb

Screen grab of Apple's 'Motion' page

With the release of Motion and XSan, or rather, the construction of their Apple.com info pages, we may finally be seeing real evidence of Apple’s involvement with Zeldman and Douglas Bowman. A quick source-check of either page reveals an HTML Transitional DOCTYPE and a more-or-less clean markup, with a table for the main layout and CSS for the rest.

But I didn’t need to check the source to know what I would find. For the first time in my somewhat goldfish-like memory of web design trends, Apple’s site design is clearly derivative of others out there – although in this case ‘derivative’ is not necessarily a derogatory term.

It appears that much of the Apple site has now been re-coded to comply with certain web standards that none of us could fail, cough cough, to be aware of, but it’s the ‘Pro Digital Production’ and ‘Apple Server Solutions’ sections of the site that bear the most marked aesthetic relationship with the Cult of XHTML/CSS. Hello, fixed-width content area floating centrally in a sea of window! Hail thee, drop shadow of the gods! Welcome, border: 1px dotted #ddd; !

Apple’s trusty site-wide Aqua tabs are now looking old. Who would’ve thought?

My XHTML and CSS knowledge is relatively limited: if I want something to look a certain way, then I’ll code and tweak and code and tweak until I get it pretty much right, relying heavily on the kind assistance of people at CSS-Discuss when head-scratching fails me along the way. What I’m really interested in (and I’ve heard general rumblings about this around the place recently, although I can’t for the moment put my finger on where) is the way these standards, which are for all intents and purposes technological in nature, so strongly inform our visual sense. More on this some other time.

Views from the Floor

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