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Geoff Hoon is officially a fuckwit. Although I doubt this ever needed any confirmation.

Labour will lose the next general election. This was 90% certain on Tuesday, today it’s 100%.

What makes this whole thing so annoying is that recently Labour had at least been making a decent fist of it. As the election approaches, the Tories’ policies were, naturally enough, being placed under the spotlight. Under The Dark Lord’s guidance, Labour had a simple plan: Let’s make the policy differences between ourselves and the Tories clear. As we come out of the recession let’s give voters a choice: Either vote for a divisive policy of Thatcherite cuts, or vote for a programme of investment and social care.

One can at least see the logic in this, even if you totally disagree. Like I say, Labour’s chances of victory were at best 10%, but at least there was some hope of riding on the anti–banker why should low–paid workers pay for the city’s mistakes ticket. Hell, Gordon even began landing a few on Cameron during PMQs.

Insipid, useless fuckwit Geoff Hoon

But then a couple of the normal malcontents (somehow Britain’s most bitter man failed to get in on the act) decided to try and unseat Brown. And then The Weasel failed (yet again) to give the PM his backing. Jack Straw—surely a man who understands the value of maintaining a united front—similarly put the knife in half way. The plot—stupid in the extreme anyway—failed. What could be more pathetic.

This during a week  when David Cameron has had to backtrack over his spending plans and could state—with a completely straight face—that class really doesn’t matter in today’s Britain. (Remember that statement in May when the PM, the Chancellor and the Mayor of London are all old Etonians).

Instead, Cameron had probably the easiest interview of his life and, more depressingly, I had to agree with him that the government is so weak that they should call an election now.

OK, so I’m redoing my site. I’m using three new/trendy things:

• HTML5
• CSS3 effects
• @font-face

Believe it or not, I’m not doing this just to be trendy. I believe all of them will help create websites that are more usable and easier to build. I’m going to record my experience of all these new web design techniques, starting with @font-face.

Why use @font-face

For us graphically challenged types (at school I got an E for effort and a 5 for attainment in art), @font-face is a good thing:

• Instead of adding a logo to a site, we can create a fancy wordmark. For clients on a budget, this is a good thing.
• It provides some texture if we’re text–based designers using the standard web fonts

Baskerville. Work's afoot on an open, free version. (Image from Wikipedia)

Problems with @font-face

• Windows and IE render many fonts poorly
• It’s a bit like a kid in a sweet shop: It’s easy to make some poor choices
• FOUT and slow download times

The first two problems will have to be resolved by designers using their judgement properly… as ever, Mac–based designers will have to step away from their beautifully–rendered text and face up to their designs in the real world (unless they’re designing sites for other Mac-based designers).

Font designers offering freely embeddable fonts will do well in this brave new world. I don’t see type subscription services taking off beyond the typophile community. In turn, we’ll soon get familiar (or bored) with certain fonts (Museo and its variants and League Gothic spring to mind.)

Thanks to some sterling work by Snook and Font Squirrel, we can now begin to tackle the FOUT problem. Here’s how I’m currently implementing @font-face:

1. Build lightweight font files by removing all unnecessary glyphs (using Font Squirrel’s generator)
2. Use the data method for Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera
3. Use a conditional statement to get IE to download the EOT file

Which means we get virtually instant display in all browsers except IE. Acceptable at this moment in time, although it’s a fast–moving area (and exciting!)

And while I’m on the subject of “good” copy…

One of the most difficult things about writing web copy on a day to day basis is taking some text from a colleague and reforming it into an often brief missive.

Parody of an advert for a writing course

Where have my lovely adjectives gone? is what they’re thinking but not saying. Most people are very polite and will save their disapproval for another time (or person. But I digress).

Untrained web writers often make these mistakes:

• they assume that not having much to say about their product or service means it somehow lacks gravitas, content &c.
• they think that writing unadorned by adjectives is dull
• they think that short, simple, active sentences are dull
• they think that their adjectives enhance the description of their product or service; that they help paint a picture
• they think bullet points, bolded keywords and short, bitty paragraphs look ugly

The problem with this approach is that readers couldn’t care less whether your product is innovative and new because they haven’t come across a product that is unoriginal or dated in the last 10 years of browsing on the web. These types of adjectives have less than zero meaning.

Readers want to know how the product you’re offering will benefit them, so a quick summary of your product’s benefits will suffice. Structure this is in a way that helps them scan your text and you’re pretty much there.

On paper (or screen) it may seem boring, and a million miles from the original author’s conception of their product, but your readers will appreciate it. I’ve seen pages generate more enquiries through “dull” writing.

In the good old days, the div element let us get away with all sorts of structural sloppiness. In fact, the only real reason for using a div wasn’t to create a pseudo-structure (as demonstrated in this article on preparing for HTML5), it was to provide a styling hook. Even the old naming conventions (sidebar &c.) were more suggestive of a page’s appearance than its structure. (Note: header and footer are just as “visual”).

Car design blueprint (from http://www.carbodydesign.com)

This semantic “purity” is perhaps the best thing about HTML5 (although the ability to embed media without resorting to plugins is none–too–shabby as well, as is the shorter, cleaner markup it generates). It also makes it more important than font-face, CSS3 &c. It does mean that constructing pages takes more thought. But that’s a really good thing as it should mean our pages will be easier to navigate and read, and serve our own purposes more as well.

All about HTML:

5

We like/appreciate/want markup that is fundamentally more semantic, and that’s what HTML5 is. A more flexible document tree is also a good thing.

But some of the semantics are confusing. How do we markup a blog sidebar that contains a list of archival links? (Another tip of the hat for rel) Is it an aside or a section? Is a list of navigation links held in a long footer actually part of a footer? Or is it another section?

Is section too vague (and therefore useful as a catch all)?