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http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/

I was pleased to see that whitehouse.gov passes W3C XHTML validation and uses jQuery.

I’d forgotten how much I love this book.

Tags. It’s not as easy to use them now. The social-ness of the site is clear. I’ve got 101 options across the top of the page to interact with the site and others, but I’ve lost easy, ginormous access to my tags.

I’ve stolen a screenshot of the previous del.icio.us design from Alan Le’s site:

In the new “delicious.com” this same functionality, getting at bookmarks with tags quickly, is buried:

The feature I most used has gone from a font-size larger than large, to a tiny font buried down into the site’s new, over-busy drop-down menu navigation nightmare.

Oh, and about drop down menus:

Now, me, I hate drop-down menus. I hate them as a user. Too many choices. It’s like those big laminated menus you get at a New York diner. Spaghetti, diet plate, French Toast, broiled filet of sole, pizza, ice cream sundae, Atkins menu, veggie burger…. The eyes blur. You slam the menu shut and order coffee.

As a designer, wherever possible, I avoid drop-down menus. For they almost always create an inferior user experience versus drilling down through clearly labeled, intelligently organized categories.

When I see a drop-down menu, I know that a committee sat around a table, unwilling to think through the organization of the site’s material into a user-focused structure — or unwilling to accept the recommendation of an information architect who spent days making sense of the site’s offerings.

Thank you, Zeldman.

An interesting exploration of different data presentation paradigms: Seek or Show: Two Design Paradigms for Lots of Data. I’m not positive “seek” or “show” encompasses all the options, but it’s definitely worth a read. Via Ajaxian. A quick peek: