I work for a very large company and it would be impractical for the visual designers to code all their work. At some point it makes sense to hand the coding responsibility off. I do think their needs to be a close relationship between the designer and the person who is doing the coding. Also the designer should get code approval.

In the end I do believe you will make a better product if the designer codes his/her own work. I love coding in live templates where you can see different instances of the data you are laying out. Makes the end product much more refined.

Like every thing their is not one answer and 37 Signals tends to write articles from there narrow perspective. So take there opinions with a grain of salt.

What say you?

On the heels of my posts about email client standards in early October, Email Standards Project has launched with a website that features a list of email clients and the support for the Email Standards Project Acid Test. This project is being led by Freshview, makers of Campaign Monitor and MailBuild. It’s great to see this getting off the ground and I hope it gains some traction.

Should web designers know how to code?

Really good post on nclud debating whether designers should know how to code. I agree that it is not totally necessary for a web designer to be a CSS master, but I do think designers who know how to code produce better work in general. The biggest problem with not coding your own designs is handing it over to another person to translate. Also, if you code your own work, you can make improvements to the design in the coding process.

NFL Network

If your a football fan that has Time Warner, Cablevision, or Comcast you probably didn’t see last night’s game due to a dispute with the NFL Network. The cable companies insist on making the NFL Network a premium, pay to watch channel. Well, the NFL Network basically streamed the Packers versus the Cowboys live on their website last night. I found the broadcast quite enjoyable and glad to see the NFL fight to get the channel to be on basic cable packages.

The Good

A friend of mine recently used one of the more well known services for a project. It was a new project that had a design, but needed the XHML and CSS code. He let me take a look at the code to assess the quality of the code. The markup was pretty good, they did a real good job with semantics and the code was valid. I did think there was a small case of DIV-itis and the markup could have been trimmed a bit.

My friend said they were accommodating with change problems that came up in the code and the turn around was as advertised. These services are perfect for small agencies that don’t have designers that code themselves and do a lot of brochure-ware small business sites.

The Bad

The biggest problem with these services is knowing when to use them and getting maintainable CSS code. Most of the services are really only suited for new projects. It’s somewhat difficult to use these services with existing sites. Then I found the way they wrote their CSS hard to follow. There are many ways to write CSS and if the service doesn’t write in a similar style, it can be hard to build upon the existing style-sheet.

There were also minor problems with cross-browser consistency. It’s good that they are willing to make changes, but I can see it becoming a pain to go back and forth, especially if you are on a deadline of your own.

The Ugly

I’ve come to think of good XHTML & CSS as sort of an art form and this makes the skill a commodity. WordPress.org says “Code is Poetry” and what these services do is make it more like gossip. I think it’s right for some situations but I think those situations are quite small. For anybody that’s worked on large, highly trafficked sites their services are just not an option.

Has anyone tried these services? What’s been your experience?

Recently, there was a post on the Campaign Monitor blog about the need for standards in HTML e-mail. Having toiled with HTML e-mail for years, it would be a huge step forward if e-mail clients would render HTML to some standard. Even if it isn’t the exact standard that is used for web browsers, anything would be better than the current state of HTML e-mail.

Currently, the company that I work for produces many HTML e-mail products with little or no idea how each client renders it. Then there are browser based clients, like gMail, that strip out CSS all together. Browser makers have come a long way to making browsers standard compliant. It’s time for e-mail client producers to do the same.

It will be interesting to see if a standards movement can be started around HTML e-mail. It will probably take years to get any type of progress, but something has to be done.

As for a crisis in web standards, there is none. Yes, there hasn’t been a ton of movement on CSS 3 and HTML 5, but thats not a crisis. More and more sites every day use and follow web standards and it’s been an amazing shift in the last 4 to 5 years. Most of the talk of a crisis is related to having new tools for web designers. Because these are voluntary standards and are not owned by one single company that can force compliance, progress will be slow.

Lets not forget how bad it was back in 1999 with the browser wars wreaking havoc on the web design profession. The whole web standards movement is mostly responsible for the growth of Firefox and in helping Microsoft get off their asses and make IE 7. Lets not whine too much, because it could be a lot worse.

Transmit

There are a myriad of FTP programs for Mac OS X and I’ve tried a bunch, but I always return to Transmit. The interface is slick and when you connect to a server the folders and files view work similar to Mac OS X’s Finder. A recently added feature is the ability to open a number of connections in different tabs; I use this all the time now and couldn’t live without it. I use Transmit in tandem with Textmate by clicking on files I would like to edit and saving them back down in Textmate. It’s pretty seamless. You can also attach any file extension to different apps that you would like Transmit to open as the external editor. So all of my CSS, HTML, PHP, and JS files go to Textmate and all graphics open in Photoshop. If you’re looking for a solid FTP program, give Transmit a try.

Textmate

Using Textmate is like a religious experience — once you use it, it’s hard to think of working any other way. Textmate is pretty simple on the surface, but where it derives its power is from the pre-installed Bundles. Bundles are a customizable set of Snippets and Commands. Most of the Bundles are for numerous programming languages and there are some great ones for scrubbing text and even ones for getting more Bundles. What makes the Bundles great are that they are fully customizable, so if I don’t like the style of the Bundles code, I can just edit it. A huge time saver are tab-stops. Basically, you type a short phrase and hit tab and the code is completed for that phrase. This way of working is so ingrained in my head that there are times when I’m in a web form and I’ll try to trigger code completion, not realizing I can only do that in Textmate. Textmate runs about $50 US so it’s not hugely expensive. I’m looking forward to the new Leopard-only version coming this fall.

Paparazzi

This is another tools that is super simple and works perfectly. It’s free to try and use, but i’d throw the developer a couple bucks via donation. Basically, Paparazzi allows you to take a full screen shot of a web page, not just a browser window. It allows you to specify the size of the screen shot and even allows you to delay the shot, in case there is some Flash on the page you would like to capture at a specific moment. I use this a lot when I’m making changes to an existing site. Most of the time the original mock-up for the site isn’t representative of what the site has grown to be, so it makes more sense to take a screen shot and add the changes.

Wrap up

Well, those are the tools I spend a lot of my time working in. If you work in something that you think is better, I would love to here about. Just leave a comment below.

• HTML Dog
• The Zen of CSS Design
• Stylin’ with CSS
• Designing w/ Web Standards
• Bulletproof Web Design
• CSS Mastery