What is “cool” in web design today is certainly not what was cool six months or a year ago, though the Web 2.0 swelling had begun to recede by the summer of 2007. Designers as a whole have grown tired of the gloss, reflections, and gradient-filled rounded corners. As a visual trend, Web 2.0 had a slightly immature look to it. But the decline of this style has helped the design world to mature and increase in depth.

Lately Jeff Croft, a major voice among professional web designers, has created stir with his opinions on mainstream issues such as CSS frameworks and web standards. Other prominent figures such as Andy Clarke, Alex Russell, and Roger Johansson have created similar discussions and memes.

Many bloggers say the future of web design is unclear, and the advancement of the tools we use to create our work, such as CSS and HTML, is even more uncertain. The reputation of working groups organized for the revisions of these tools are being questioned all across the board, as they slowly work their way forward.

Many of us know in the back of our minds that the future of web design is closely connected with the future of the computers themselves, but we fail to realize the coming situations, where nearly everything we’ve learned (and practiced) is going to be challenged by the release of new operating systems from Microsoft, Apple, and the vast Open-Source community. The only thing we can do now is help to improve the tools we use to design and build websites, and unite to stand firm against bad influences and trends that threaten our standards and practices.

It’s hazardous to our health

What is cool today in web design? That question cannot be answered definitely. Many of us are certainly glad that the bulk of the Web 2.0 design styling has been put behind us, but where do we go now? It’s time to put much more energy and time into producing creative and innovative things. One designer states that the internet may be becoming too crowded and uninspiring; most of us would beg to differ, but it makes a good point. We cannot stand for a moment to stop pushing ahead at full throttle to uselessly look back on our past. And even more importantly, we cannot afford to be bogged down in bubble design trends such as Web 2.0 or (heaven forbid the term) Web 3.0. It’s simply not healthy.

Whether knowingly or unknowingly, we have modelled and treated the internet like our lives outside of computers - where fads come and go, but certain things remain. Gloss, 3D imitations, reflections, these things will soon be a thing of the past, just as tiny text, comic sans and flashing text have already been retired. But certain things remain from all stages of the internet’s past growth. Using tables for page layout has been replaced by CSS and proper HTML structural elements such as the div tag. This is one thing that will undoubtedly remain, until something far superior replaces it.

The programming and coding side of Web 2.0 will certainly last for a while longer, because it is arguably one of the best things that has developed since the beginning of server-side development. Firmly founded social networking websites like Facebook and Digg are not soon to fade away; people have seen the great advantages of such systems.

Maybe it is time to try something crazy, as Jeff Croft puts it. Time for a creativity revolution, a greater independence among web designers, and a greater unity to improve the design world we have worked so hard to build and develop.

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A Brief Introduction to CSS Hacks

For those who don’t know a lot about CSS hacks, here’s a simple explanation: they take advantage of browser bugs (or browser “weaknesses”) to hide certain styling rules from specific browsers, using special characters/words that are interpreted differently. The use of these hacks is a subject of much debate in the blogosphere these days.

Various standardistas and web designers such as Roger Johansson and Peter-Paul Koch have spoken out against the use of CSS hacks, saying conditional comments are the way to go. In my opinion this the best option for every designer who needs to assign different CSS property values for different browsers. It rids our stylesheets of the messy hacks and workarounds used to tame the pages, and it helps to organize and streamline our CSS.

Code for the Future

Abstaining from using CSS hacks is the way to prepare for the bright future of CSS. This was mentioned by Roger Johansson a while ago in an interview that was posted on Fadtastic, and I want to reinforce that point again. In this uncertain world we code in, there’s really no telling what bugs will be fixed and what bugs won’t be. There must not be any place in the semantic web for a mess of “!important” hacks and weird selectors.

I think it’s pretty obvious that the clean, straightforward stylesheet (with no hacks) is the ideal setup, and the closest we can get to this for the time being is conditional comments. This is for the time being, leaving room for browser improvements and less hassle when cleaning up our code to comply with the new breed of browsers.

Do conditional comments fall into the “hacks” category? If you consider a CSS “hack” to be anything that gives special instructions to certain browsers, the answer is yes. But since conditional comments don’t utilize one browser bug to fix another one (as all real CSS hacks do), they can be put into a category of their own.

Conclusion

Finally, I’ll say that every web designer should use CSS hacks as a last resort only, and not as common practice. If your pages have a rendering problem in Internet Explorer, spend as much time as you can searching for a semantic solution that doesn’t use a CSS hack to solve the problem. If this fails, use conditional comments to correctly apply the proper rules to the misbehaving browser. Keep hacks out of your code, and you’ll set an example for the design world to follow (and save yourself some grief down the road).

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