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    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.

    Visit blogHN submissions
    Web DevelopmentDesign & UXCareer & Work
    What HN says

    HN 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.

    Stats for nerds
    26HN people shared it
    24linked in comments
    284story points
    Jan 2014last shared
    2007people per year2014

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Web standards killed the HTML star
      2 people · 76 points · first shared 2014 · 52 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
      1 person · 59 points · first shared 2008 · 36 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Don’t tell me about your product
      1 person · 27 points · first shared 2009 · 11 comments on HN
    4. 4
      Top ten things that suck about Django, revisited
      2 people · 26 points · first shared 2008 · 2 comments on HN
    5. 5
      On Coda 2 and Diet Coda
      2 people · 26 points · first shared 2012 · 30 comments on HN
    6. 6
      JeffCroft.com: On Flash
      1 person · 18 points · first shared 2010 · 9 comments on HN
    7. 7
      "Don't use web standards because Jeffrey Zeldman told you to," Blueprint's class names are OK
      3 people · 8 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Ryan Funduk: Our Culture of Exclusion
      1 person · 8 points · first shared 2012 · 1 comments on HN
    9. 9
      Web Design vs. Product Design
      1 person · 7 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
    10. 10
      Why are there no web designers in W3C?
      1 person · 5 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • 54mfMay 2012

      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

    • tannercJan 2014

      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-star/
      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-dead

    • masklinnAug 2010

      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-it-html5.html

      http://www.zeldman.com/2010/08/03/html5-fuzzies/

    • gtaniSep 2008

      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-revisited/

      http://42topics.com/blog/2008/04/five-things-i-hate-about-django/

      http://justin.harmonize.fm/index.php/2008/09/django-round-2/

    • bootloadDec 2007

      "... 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-presentation-separation/

    • rimantasAug 2010

      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).

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