My good friend Michel Martine has written Jazz Blogging - It’s the Notes You Don’t Play an excellent post in which he fiercely defends a blog post shouldn’t be perfect and shouldn’t try to be, because one of the key features of a blog is conversation and space should be left to the reader to join the discussion.
I agree with him but only in part.
Among the almost infinite list of HTML entities, the non-breaking space ( ) is one of the most popular but very little understood.
The correct place for a is, for instance, in “Mr. Smith”. The will avoid a line break between Mr. and Smith, while leaving a space between them.
The non-breaking space earned its fame because in the dark days of the table layouts people needed to put content on certain elements without visual rendering.
As the normal space is discarded by the browser in most situations an entity like the non-braking space, which is always considered and yet has no shape was very welcome to leave a gutter.
Yet, the should not be used to leave gutters. While it is quick and easy to put them, is really a nightmare to upgrade, because markup and presentation are all mixed. The role of the non-breaking space is actually to bind things together and not so separate them.
It is often said that content is king, still, conscious people around insist that layout and design for you blog/site is essential.
In fact, I think this is no contradiction at all, no monarch can keep the throne without proper garment.
I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with informative blogs. Those that doesn’t have original content and just collect things around the web. In fact, I do read regularly a couple of them.
But I do think that a blogger who doesn’t put thoughts and feelings on his blog is missing a huge chance to learn.
Guilherme
is a Web Designer focused on web standards and the web ahead of us.
On his free time he enjoys cinema, travelling, cooking and eating.
