Archive for the 'Web dev' category

formula1.com — wow!

The official F1 site has, over the years, seen more than a good share of changes. Year after year I was visiting it, hoping to be something usable and pleasant. Alas, it wasn’t the case. From the Flash-all-over-the-place stages to the designed-for-640px – this site had all the signs of a site being designed by agencies going for bling-bling instead of usability and friendliness.
It was so horrible, that I often went to f1-live.com, because official site rarely offered anything interesting or up to the minute news. The only usable thing was a race countdown. The track and driver’s information were fine, but often so poorly executed that I had no inclination to read through.

Imagine my surprise when Damir sent me an IM how come you have not commented on the new F1 site. The current site is almost fantastic. It finally uses a decent amount of screen real-estate. It has normal columns with just the right use of whitespace in between. Design is clean with the right amount of speed spiciness, navigation is understandable and well organized. Underlying code is XHTML Strict and the whole layout makes heavy use of CSS.

They have not stopped with technicalities and graphics – the content is a-must-read. I spent half a day reading through Hall of Fame articles. Gerald Donaldson writes with so much passion and wit that I couldn’t stop grinning every second paragraph. It’s passages like this that drives you to explore the site and look for more:

He affected an aura of bravado and cut a dashing figure to match. With his flowing moustache, untamed mane of long blond hair and swaggering walk he resembled a swashbuckling pirate who might plunder and pillage for pleasure. He used his car like a sword, swinging it about ferociously, cutting a swathe through the corners, kicking up dust, grass and tyre smoke and carving great chunks of time out of each circuit.

(On Keke Rosberg, 1982 F1 champion)

This section alone is a prime example of copy-writing being the important part of the overall site quality, just like good design and technical fluency.

Web site is not perfect and there are some stuff that could be changed, but I don’t want to nit-pick – I’m gonna read the rest of the Hall of Fame articles instead.

IE8 beta1 ships, standardista rejoys

What an exciting times…

One theme I hope developers notice here is interoperability. The team understands how big an impact differences between browsers (and previous versions of IE in particular) have had on developers in terms of wasted time, frustration, and (in some cases) limiting the experience that they deliver to users. We want to deliver a big step forward in real-world interoperability for developers with IE8, and standards are at the core of our approach. This topic deserves a lot more than just this paragraph; expect more soon.

To read something like this on IE team blog page makes me warm in heart. With the previous announcement that IE8 will push the standards as hard as it can (and Microsoft certainly can) this is genuinely warming. The amount of cursing I do regarding IE7 is several orders of magnitude less than what I do with IE6. I genuinely believe IE8 will be a pleasure to test and develop. Yes, I’m hoping on the hype bandwagon, full speed. IE developer center is an active place as it was back in IE4 days, when Microsoft was in its best days.

There are three main points that trouble me with IE7, listed by annoying factor.

z-index positioning contexts: I will test and re-test my z-index tutorial in IE8 and update it accordingly. This is the single most infuriating quibble I have left with IE and the main reason I still have to use IE7.css under conditional comments.

Another issue I’m looking forward to check is does IE8 support :after and :before in line with other browsers, so at least float clearing will not be an issue anymore. min-height:0 does the job in IE7, abusing the content box expanding bug. Speaking of which…

Third issue is exactly that: if the content I have in particular box can’t fit in it, it should stick out and overlap the neighboring content; it should not expand the whole box thus destroying my lovely float-based layouts.

If these things are done properly…man, would I be a singing web developer then.

DOCTYPE switch, part II

This is going to be one of the most linked to ALA articles and the source of controversy and dicsussion in months (years) to come.

http://alistapart.com/articles/beyonddoctype

There must have been thunderous complaints that Microsoft received from big enterprise clients. I do not see what else would drive them to look for a solution like this.
I read it twice and still can’t decide is this good or bad. On one hand, it is a way to prevent urgent evening calls from clients that some customers are reporting site is not looking ok. In the past, I frequently stated this is not a problem for me, but I can understand that it is not something everyone would accept.

It saddens me a bit that cleaning up the web will not be a viable future at all. If IE8 has gone fully standard-oriented, I assumed that in 8–10 years majority of web sites on the Internet would be standard-compliant. It might still be that way…

At least the basis (IE8, FF3, Safari 3) would be good.

Dear PayPal, have you heard of Unicode?

“ć” is letter. Maybe not in Latin1, but certainly is in Unicode.

This is far from first time that I have issues like this. I recently bought the promo bundle on macupdate.com and entered the same letter in my last name, which gave me 12 serial numbers based on “Aleksandar Vacić” because it converted the letter into HTML entity.
To PayPal’s credit, at least they don’t allow this to happen so I don’t have to see a display as ugly as this:

This also happened when I bought TopStyle Pro few years ago, through eSellerate.

What is it with these web sites?
Are they all based on decade old code snippets, before the wide spread use of Unicode and UTF-8? How can any current website allows itself the luxury of not using Unicode, in this era of globalization?

Amateurish, to put it mildly.

CardroomSupply.com — web design review

I don’t think I ever played poker extensively. I remember playing Raub a lot few summers, a very simple and addictive hungarian game of cards. And that’s about it.
Thus you can imagine that I never needed a professional poker furniture. Guys from Rounders would probably have a thing or two to say on it, but not me.

Thus, I’m not a guy who would be a customer of CardroomSupply.com nor I can give you a review on the goods and services they provide.
What I can review is the web site through which all these beauties are sold. Full disclosure: this is payed review through ReviewMe.com service.

Continue reading CardroomSupply.com — web design review