Material Design invades web UIs, HTML5, and free beer!

It is all very odd, but I am seeing evidence that many really popular websites are migrating to the new Android 5.0(Lollipop) look via CSS even before Android 5.0 is launched. Not necessarily the animations, but the focus on minimalism with fewer images than what was the current trend until very, very recently. I see no mention of this elsewhere, but "flat" layout is really becoming pervasive on some very large websites. Of course this is driven by four rational site design criteria.

1) The rise of the mobile web

2) Standards compliance sans evil Flash..it is pst due to put a nail in the coffin of Flash/Shockwave. Adobe be damned!

3) The maturation of good web design requires easy footprint pages because not everyone has high bandwidth connections.

And four..

4) Android 5 is really elegant, and web designers are certain to try and emulate much of Material Design in websites, as this gives the site user familiar terrain with which to navigate, explore, and buy.

I am waiting for high adoption of HTML5 as only this month the W3C has finally called it done. This is terrific news for people like me that code only a few sites per year, and I can finally get on with going to the next step as I have been writing been writing in "XHTML 1.0 Strict" for nearly a decade.

As per usual, the terrific group at The Mozilla Foundation via Firefox 3x is best in W3C compliance. I have 33.0.2 installed, and it is my favorite browser. You have to love open source projects. If you're interested in what is new and cool, as well as what is not so good, Mozilla offers release notes with every update. Be careful as adding extensions rapidly increases system RAM use, and even free of extensions, Firefox enjoys using lots of system RAM. What you get in return is speed and the highest level of compliance to adopted Web standards. For geeks(some would say that I am more a nerd) like me, that's a totally acceptable tradeoff.

Sorry, no free beer.

I know that writing about artful web design using a stone stock Blogger template is not a display of any skill at all. I spent a few days writing pages that incorporated the PHP, but Google kept breaking my code back in 2003 using Javasript. Now I do not have the ambition to screw around with the Blogger APIs to write a nice, tidy template.

Here is an example of a site that I developed, but I told the owner that they were limited to one homepage image. The image was the background image. I tried to pull up an older homepage via archive.org, but none show the background image. That site used to look much more minimalist without sacrificing any features. I lost the account because the chief officer and I had differing opinions as to what an eCommerce site should appear to the visitor. If you go to archive.org, you can see the neat little homepage sans the background image.

I had a bunch of pages written using TopStyle 5 and a portable version of the CoffeeCup Editor, but for some reason the HTML will not load into any browser to take a screenshot.

It is one of those days. I am too disheartened to grab some code from my server, or even screens that I sent to clients on CD as that are buried in the stacks of thousands that I have.