Welcome to episode one of the Q&A with CSS Zen Master and Web Directions North 2008 organizer Dave Shea.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work and services?
Dave Shea: These days I’m mainly focused on doing front end design and UI work for clients. I dabble with back end code and CMSes from time to time, but I generally focus on the front end stuff. I did a few icon sets recently to get back into illustration, and right now I’m spending most of my time putting together a Vancouver web design and development conference, Web Directions North 2008.
Q: Any comments on the state of CSS? Can you hightlight some CSS achievements and some CSS roadblocks still broken in today’s browsers holding back the full beauty of CSS design?
Dave Shea: Seems to me like CSS development is in a bit of limbo right now, at least from a designer/developer in-the-trenches perspective. The stuff I use day to day hasn’t changed much in the past few years. Some browsers are way ahead of me in what they support (Safari, Firefox), but I have to use a common baseline that works all the way back to IE6, so I don’t get to enjoy fancy stuff like opacity and multi-columns.
The nice thing is, despite this, the design community has figured out enough tricks by now to basically do what we need to with CSS. The new stuff would certainly make my life easier, but I don’t really feel like it’s holding me back. In the 5 years since pretty much jumping over to CSS exclusively, I have yet to design something I can’t build.
Q: What’s your take on using CSS beyond styling for adding semantics as advocated by the Microformats best practices?
Dave Shea: Well, the semantics actually come from class names, which are a part of the HTML. You can definitely style them with CSS after the fact, but the semantics exist in the markup layer.
I think the whole Microformats concept is a great idea. It builds on the tools we already have in a responsible way, and extends the stuff we already create to be more useful. The true Semantic Web is a world apart from the stuff I build daily, and seems vague and untouchable. I wouldn’t even know where to start. Microformats make immediate sense to me, and provide me with new tools to add to my arsenal.
Q: What’s the future of the CSS Zen Garden?
Dave Shea: I actually just addressed this recently in a blog post titled “Moving Along: What’s up with the CSS Zen Garden?“. Things are moving again finally.
Thanks Dave Shea. Check back tomorrow for the second part in the interview with CSS Zen Master Dave Shea discussing Microsoft’s Silverlight, the best web design practices in action on the Web Directions North 2008 site and much more.
