Jeff Croft
jeffcroft.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Jeff Croft, a web designer and developer, writes about web standards, CSS, Django, HTML5, and careers in web design.
What HN saysHN commenters reference his views on whether web designers can sustain a career and on Django, and quote replies from Panic's Steven Frank on his posts.
26HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
24stories submitted
284story points
13 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1"Don't use web standards because Jeffrey Zeldman told you to," Blueprint's class names are OK3 people · 8 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
- 2On the term 'HTML5'3 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 3Web standards killed the HTML star2 people · 76 points · first shared 2014 · 52 comments on HN
- 4On Coda 2 and Diet Coda2 people · 26 points · first shared 2012 · 30 comments on HN
- 5Top ten things that suck about Django, revisited2 people · 26 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
- 6On Applying OOP Concepts to CSS2 people · 3 points · first shared 2009 · 2 comments on HN
- 7Why We Don't Skip Photoshop1 people · 59 points · first shared 2008 · 36 comments on HN
- 8Don’t tell me about your product1 people · 27 points · first shared 2009 · 11 comments on HN
- 9JeffCroft.com: On Flash1 people · 18 points · first shared 2010 · 9 comments on HN
- 10Ryan Funduk: Our Culture of Exclusion1 people · 8 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Web Design vs. Product Design1 people · 7 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Why are there no web designers in W3C?1 people · 5 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
- 13JeffCroft.com: On admin interfaces1 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 14Django’s URL template tag sucks1 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 15IPad thoughts1 people · 2 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
tannerc · 2014-01-16
The concern of what advancements in technology mean for web workers has recently blossomed in main circles.
Jeff Croft wrote that being a web designer isn't enough to sustain a career.[1] Jeffrey Zeldman countered that argument with the notion that being an expert in the field is enough to sustain oneself, but only if you can expand on your knowledge with other skills.[2] Andrew Clarke then followed-up on both of those pieces.[3]
It's an interesting time to be involved in tech, especially on the web. What comes next is simply more adaptation, what other choice to we (as workers) have?
1. http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2014/jan/03/web-standards-killed-the-html-st…
2. http://www.zeldman.com/2014/01/06/its-2014-is-web-design-dead/
3. http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/its-2014.-web-design-isnt-dea…
masklinn · 2010-08-08
This discussion was, in fact, making the rounds of the standardistas a week or two ago (following the release of html5test). Not only did everybody agree with your assessment, but most of them thought it was good (only a few people such as Tantek are trying to make HTML5 refer only to the W3C HTML5 spec... they'll fail).
As Chris Wilson insightfully put it:
> HTML5 is now a brand, more than it is a specification. There are a variety of reasons for that, and a variety of persons “responsible” for that confusion, but the ship has sailed.
See also:
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/01/html5-test/
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/aug/02/term-html5/
http://blog.codinginparadise.org/2010/06/why-im-going-to-keep-calling-…
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/03/html5-fuzzies/
deepakjois · 2009-06-16
I think it is important to differentiate between HAML syntax and SASS. Even though both are part of the same package, SASS syntax is actually quite minimal and closely follows CSS syntax, without the extraneous syntactical elements like curly braces etc.
Chris Eppstein, the inventor of SASS has stated elsewhere that one of his primary goals is to make SASS friendly for designers to use, and he claims to have sought feedback from designers as well. See comments here : http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2009/may/20/applying-oop-concepts-css/#c1507…
bootload · 2007-12-11
"... Django has a clever admin interface that gives you easy access to every data model you can dream up, but this is only a really neat hack. ..."
The best thing in django IMOBO is the admin & the fact it makes you concentrate and work on the data first. On the other hand the template engine logic (at least the way some users uggest you use it) [0] is pretty ordinary and unrealistic (LJWorld is mostly read hence static templates). I still think I had a better time using tt2 (TemplateToolkit).
[0] http://www2.jeffcroft.com/blog/2007/aug/09/myth-content-and-presentati…
54mf · 2012-05-22
I had a whole response ready, but it looks like Steven Frank - one of the founders and devs at Panic - replied in the comments and addressed all the issues:
"We edit directly on a server — but not our production server. We have a staging server which is an identical clone of the production server, and also a Subversion working copy. A deployment script syncs everything over to production when it’s ready, which is a separate operation from committing it to the svn repo.
Ever since we shipped Coda 1, we’ve learned that there are as many ways to set up a web development infrastructure as there are web developers. There’s no way we could be a perfect fit for everyone’s workflow, so we concentrated on what we perceived to be the most common workflows, and those that would the most generally adaptable."
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2012/may/22/on-coda-2-and-diet-coda/#c167677
rimantas · 2010-08-06
Jeff Croft:
But I think there’s actually a very good reason
why we should, in fact, embrace the term “HTML5”
as an overarching buzzword for this latest round
of web standards and specifications. Our industry
has proven on several occasions that we don’t get
excited about new, interesting, and useful technologies
and concepts until such a buzzword is in place.
Source: http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/aug/02/term-html5/ via
http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/03/html5-fuzzies/ (there is a term HART proposed in comments, I quite like that one).
davidedicillo · 2010-05-10
The problem is that even if Apple supported Flash, it wouldn't probably work anyway...
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/may/08/android-flash-demo-flashcamp-sea…
gtani · 2008-09-24
One of my deciders is how many people are blogging or writing to mailing lists with problems or tutorials or sample code, whatever. Django is really a nice framework, but when you start googling specific issues, e.g. working with an ajax lib or finding/deploying to a VPS/ shared host, ther'es a lot more blog entries on specific issues/techniques that people have used in PHP than in Django. Also true for PHP activity in delicious, subreddits, stackoverflow, and the wall of PHP books at Borders.
You might want to look at the recetn django articles
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2008/jul/25/top-ten-things-suck-about-django…
http://42topics.com/blog/2008/04/five-things-i-hate-about-django/
http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2008/09/django-round-2/
utnick · 2008-02-21
i just read a blog post taking the other side of this argument:
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2007/aug/09/myth-content-and-presentation-se…