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What happened to :: ?

Posted by Andrew Faulkner on August 18th, 2005.

Andrew Faulkner is the admin at fadtastic. Andrew prides himself on standards-based, accessible web design in the city of Nottingham, UK. He believes in aesthetically pleasing accessible design and that 'standards compliant does not equal boring.'

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Double Colons. I used to use this web design fad all the time. It always proved popular in contact detail lists:

Tel :: 01234 567890

or in titles of pages

web design trends :: journal

But suddenly, the world seemed to forget it. Where did it go? My theory on this is twofold. Like all fads, overuse kicks in. About a year after someone starts a fad they look commonplace and designers move on. Others follow and the fad is forgotten.

Also, having many titles with double colons does not bode well for Search Engine Optimisation. It can be confusing for a spider (of the Internet variety) to come across these weird items of text. Maybe this killed them off.

I certainly miss them. I loved ‘hipping a page up’ just by placing them all over the show. But when will they be back? Well, fads are started by designers and I believe double colons will be back with avengance when CSS3 rolls out, assuming it has double colon pseudo element support. If it does then designers will remember the good old days and it’ll be ‘retro cool’ to use them again. Wahey.

Example

I struggled to find an example - Let me know of any still out there. I tried searching for double colons but came up with nasty results.

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I for one HATED these. They looked to me as if a person was trying to ‘tech up’ their site, yet just ended up looking stupid because of huge overuse.

In addition to that, it reminds me of the worst trend I’ve ever known; the typical ‘.:’ used in many navigations.

.: Navigation :.
- Home …

Oh dear.

Veracon
August 18th, 2005
#

Well, I think it’s mostly because of overuse and - what you mentioned - because of search engines. I miss it a little bit myself.
Good post ;)

Alex-K
August 18th, 2005
#

the worst trend I’ve ever known; the typical ‘.:’ used in many navigations.

I could do an article on it. ;)

aspiramedia
August 19th, 2005
#

I still use them …

Look in the titles:

rickler.com
shootandslice.com

But then these sites are years old and too big to worry about small the things!

Lee Rickler
August 23rd, 2005
#

Excellent. An example.

But can anyone find those elusive sites with :: in the navigation or content? Answers on a postcard. Or let me know here.

aspiramedia
August 23rd, 2005
#

For me ::’s go hand in hand with those 1px diagonal lines you used to see EVERYWHERE, and still do see quite a lot…

3stripe
August 25th, 2005
#

they are more of a style icon now!, like 3stripe says, they are everywhere. heh.

William Smith
August 30th, 2005
#

Here’s a website that uses them. Lots!

http://www.mt.com.mk/eng/

S.
September 22nd, 2006
#

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