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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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Attention Fireworks and Photoshop users

13 August 2003

To all Fireworks and Photoshop/ImageReady users:- Go ahead, design you sites in a professional image manipulation program. That’s a good thing to do. It helps with layout, it helps in defining a specific look and feel, it gives you control and creative freedom all in an environment built for the task. But: keep the hell away from the automatic HTML export features.

Repeat after me: “No matter how good my intentions, automatic slicing and dicing does not a good website make”.

To the following files:- transparent.gif, shim.gif, spacer.gif, pixel.gif. I ended our relationship more than two years ago. Please stop contacting me like this. I do not wish to see you again. You were to me but a last resort – and I truly believe that’s all you will ever allow yourself to be. Please respect my feelings and leave me alone.

To the head chef:- This week I had the misfortune to sample your Tag Soup. It was foul tasting and left me feeling somewhat nauseous. Many high class, professional restaurants have seen fit to stop serving this dish as it ultimately leaves the customer dissatisfied. I recommend that it is removed from your menu forthwith.

- Drew McLellan

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Comments

  1. § Tony: The ”Links in new windows” checkbox is simply genius.

    Sorry for an offtopic post.

    PS. I agree about spacer.gif
  2. § Blake: Amen, brother. Amen.
  3. § Nathan Pitman: That’s a whole lotta transparent GIFs going to be waiting in line at the job centre.
  4. § Nathan Pitman: Perhaps you should run a 1 pixel transparent GIF amnesty, designers and developers can come and own up to their sins...
  5. § Kris: You’ll be getting in trouble with its big brother: spacer.jpg
  6. § janny: when your slicing up something in Image Ready and your slices are not aligned up properly to suit table columns thats when the program automatically adds in spacers....
  7. § sklp: That’s why they’re called professional image manipulation programs not something else
  8. § Jesse: How about turning off the auto insert of spacing images?

    ...hate spacer images.. hate hate hate!
  9. § Enzo: Bitch, bitch, bitch - moan, moan, moan - so what’s the big deal. Who cares? Leave the poor gifs alone.
  10. § wally: mad
  11. § Jesse: We have no power at the moment.. well a little :) Batteries and generators are cool.

    It’s the gif’s!!!!
  12. § christina weisbard: Think THAT’S bad, you shoulda seen the tables that old fossil NetObjects Fusion wrote out. Critical. At least you can choose not to use this option.
  13. § owen: fireworks rocks! It does what it’s made to do. I’m a none designer so I guess it appeals to me more.
  14. § Drew: Fireworks does indeed rock. I do believe it may also roll. I use it extensively in my own work after its vector-based methodology won me over from the inflexibility of Photoshop. Photoshop wanted commitment that I wasn’t prepared to give.

    Its auto-slicing and HTML export features, however, are only good for quick mock-ups. I’d say that Fireworks HTML cannot be used as production code. Maybe I should more properly say it should not be used as production code.
  15. § Picso: I adopted pixel.gif and forced it to be my sex slave. I don't let it go outside my bedroom (it doesn't have access to the internet, too), so relax.
  16. § ryan: preach on.
  17. § owen: pixel.gif? spacer.gif is cooler anyway, I’ve converted it to s.gif to save bandwidth. I like them when they were fun. :(
  18. § designbay:

    I’d like to reopen this topic. There was one viable answer, from Jesse:

    “How about turning off the auto insert of spacing images?”

    Is it really that simple??

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan (@drewm) has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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