Analysis: In the second of a two-part column, prominent Web designers and developers talk about what was hot and what was not in 2005.Last week, a few prominent designers and developers gave us their year-end thoughts on Web 2.0, AJAX, grids and typography.
This week we'll focus on some of the other aspects of Web design. Namely CSS, standards, microformats, video and Flash.
Microformats
For some developers, 2005 was the year of microformats. Microformats are sets of data intended to give more meaning to content on the Internet.
"Web 2.0 allows the creation of environments that make Web-based personal information management much more appealing," said Mark Trammell, Web developer and co-author of Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design. "This also creates silos of information often owned by competing camps. Microformats can help bridge those gaps and apply meaning to the display of that information."
Microformats.org does a great job of explaining:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
Garrett Dimon also wrote an excellent primer on Microformats for Digital Web Magazine.
CSS and Standards
"I think this was the year when it became self-evident that standards-oriented design
is the way to go," said author and CSS guru Eric Meyer. "I can't remember the last time I had to defend the practice, and whenever that was, it wasn't in 2005. At this point, it's basically all over but the training."
The biggest gap that remains, according to many observers, is between the knowledge of the existence of standards and a designer's ability to actually code to those standards.
Any designers that need a hand in this area are encouraged to check out Alex Robinson's essay In Search of the One True Layout.
Developer and Mac nerd John Gruber also thinks good coding had a renaissance this year.
"I think it's becoming conventional wisdom that responsible and talented Web designers care as much about the quality of their markup as they do the rendered appearance of their work. Apps like Dreamweaver and GoLive are becoming less relevant as time goes on," said Gruber, who develops pluggins for text-based code-editing tools.
Some designers, while excited about the power of CSS and standards, sounded a note of caution.
"I'm all for the separation of content and presentation as a smart way to handle design tasks but to my mind, the best designed experiences in print, Web and everything else for that matter, come from the intelligent and thoughtful marriage of content and presentation as single unified whole," said Jim Coudal, founder of influential Chicago-based development firm Coudal Partners.
Video and Flash
Video was a hot topic on the Web this year. Macromedia—now subsumed into Adobe—released Flash 8. Adoption of the Flash video FLV format was hastened by companies like Google, which began using FLV for its Google Video program.
Writer and developer Jon Udell believes FLV will help to drive video interactivity:
It's my view that every media player should also be, at least potentially, an authoring tool as well. And every piece of published media content should afford, at least potentially, a canonical address—indeed, a whole family of them.
Marketing and interactive design firms were also hot on the use of video on online properties.
Most agencies seem to agree that clients are interested in interactive video, not static presentation.
"The most interesting 'video' are experiences that engage the visitor with interaction, not just a passive viewing experience. I also believe that everyone is a publisher now. It has become so easy to shoot and distribute video," said Kevin Flatt, interactive creative director at design agency Fallon. "We will be seeing a monumental shift in how video is shared between consumers and publishers. Watch for Bright Cove. They see where things are headed."
During the year, there was intermittent talk about competition between Flash and AJAX. Some developers saw Flash as an extension of the AJAX library, while others saw it as a "heavy" niche technology.
"Though it has been a breath of fresh air for the Web over the past year, Javascript doesn't allow the sort of precise and complex interaction effects that Flash enables," said , developer and blogger. "Flash is a potential next step when Javascript limits the ability to create these type of enhancements. But the proprietary nature of Flash and the relative ease of reverse-engineering Javascript could continue being a barrier to wide-spread adoption of Flash."
Web Design 
