I don't know whether there's a French equivalent, but in my little corner of l'Acadie, I've been living the web development equivalent of the English adage that "the cobbler's children have no shoes." Meaning that I have yet to put any content out on the business domain I've been hosting for over two and a half years.
That's finally changing. Anyone who knows my "business" Twitter account (bonaventuresoft) recognises the sailing ship avatar. It's a nod to the ships so closely entwined with New Brunswick's history. (I just want to go on record now as saying that NB has the coolest flag of any of the Canadian provinces/territories. Sorry, everybody else.)
But I digress.
To me, the sailing ship evokes the 18th century, and its Colonial-era aesthetic here on the East Coast, so I was trying to capture that look and feel as much as feasible for the eventual home of the bits that will make up www.bonaventuresoftware.ca. Obviously, I don't want to completely replicate the newspapers and almanacs of those times in every respect. Multi-column layouts and packed text is antithetical to the web browser experience. And--for cryin' in yer syllabub--keep that stupid "s" that looks like an "f" out of the 21st century.
Now, calligraphy is one of my nerderies; alas, my grasp of its fundamentals is only applicable up to about the year 1600 or so. But of the several favours I owe Tantramar Interactive, one is pointing me to the correct font-family for the job.
In Design is a Job, Mike Monteiro points out that the increasing sophistication of web browsers (and their sorta-kinda-maybe-lip-service-commitment to W3C standards) renews the demand for skills of traditional print-oriented graphic artists. In particular, programmers who code solely for newer browsers have enough fine-grained control over layout, typography, gradients, transparency, etc. And goodbye to "Any font you like, as long as it's Arial or Roman." (Woo-hoo!)
Which is great news for those of us who use the web day-in and day-out. For those of us who make things for the web, but do not have a graphics background, not so much. And thus much of my time on this project has been spent fighting small skirmishes with things like indentation. And tilting at windmills like aligning the Roman numerals used in a list.
(This is why I'm always happy to hand layout work off to web designers/developers who actually grok cascading stylesheets (CSS). And give them ample kudos for not only understanding the difference between box and inline flow, but also knowing where the sharp edges of each version of each browser are.)
But it's not all slogging on this project. A closer look at the Atom syndication of this blog handed me an unexpected gift, namely that it includes the labels (e.g. "Software Development," "Innovation," etc.) that I can optionally apply to any blog post. That gives me a way to automatically cross-post specific topics to the blog. (In a shocking development, potential clients may not actually base their purchasing decisions on a freelancer's ability to filk tunes or scour the internet for Elvis photos. Or even for their world-class sarcasm. Who knew?)
What makes that possible is that, while HTML tags (and their attributes) are used by web developers to format content, Atom feeds (like their RSS forebears) use tags to give meaning to content. (Yes, I know that, originally, HTML was intended to denote things like paragraphs, headings, tables, etc. It didn't take too long before that was honoured more in the breach than the observance. Now, with a little CSS, you can created lists that run horizontally rather than vertically.)
Thus, in the context of one very minor project, it's hard to ignore the two directions in which the web has been--and will continue to be--pulled. The left brain prefers XML content that is what it says it is (titles, publication dates, etc.). The right brain wants HTML5 that's pretty and friendly to any number of screen sizes.
And while I'm fairly disciplined about marking up my HTML to make it XML-like, I know by now that the promise of XHTML will never be realised. But maybe convergence isn't the point. Maybe it's a yin and yang thing...and maybe that's also fine. Because the software trade needs both left and right brains.
