It’s not often that I point out or write about standards-compliant site designs and launches which get sent to me by email, especially personal sites. But designer Cameron Adams just launched a site that I think is worth your attention. The Man in Blue boasts a simple, attractive design created with lots of background-image goodness. Notice the soft shadows everywhere, the cracks in the corners which move as the window is resized, and the intricate way lots of small borders match up to create a subtle 3D effect. A brief technical overview highlights a few more features.
Switch off the style sheets — as Cameron allows you to do via a link in the header — and note that all of those presentation effects slip away, leaving a structured document. OK, so if you look under the hood, you might notice some extraneous HTML that has no purpose other than to act as a hook for style (ala, the Zen Garden‘s markup). Cameron is up front about this, and even laments the lack of full standards support in certain browsers:
“… pages must still be littered with redundant mark-up in order to achieve graphical effects beyond your standard two-column, black-and-white blog.”