In jQuery it is possible to create nodes in a foreign document by calling jQuery('<div>sample html</div>', foreignElement.ownerDocument);. If somebody documented this I wouldn’t have lost the last hour or so.
This is why I like wiki style documentation.
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So I’ll be talking at Firefox 3 Release Event at Kiberpipa today. Feel free to come listen to the talks or just come to the party. If you can’t come you can watch the whole thing online (the link is likely to be available somewhere on the event page).
Recently two more big and very frequented Slovenian sites relaunched and I think they too deserve a mention.
The first page I want to put to the test is the new page of the first and the biggest Slovenian airline. It was recently launched by my ex colleagues at Parsek as the second version to be made there. The first edition was designed and prepared in another agency and Parsek only did the backend while the new version is all Parsek. To be fair the biggest and the most important part — the reservation module — is still made by the french company Amadeus.
The new design tries to incorporate a leaner navigation with less elements even though it became wider, almost reaching the 1000px mark. The front page is much more sales oriented, displaying a lot of useful information. I can’t get past the color scheme that is really too dull. There are quite a few validation errors, the ones in HTML mostly due to non–escaped ampersands, while those in CSS are just sloppy coding without checking the validator.
I was surprised to see that some stuff doesn’t work well with Firefox 3 and Safari 3 even though the first one isn’t released yet (will be tomorrow) and the second one doesn’t have a lot of users in Slovenia. I’d still stick to what Yahoo! has to say in their Graded Browser support table for browser support.
I was positively surprised at how well some inside pages are designed down to the last dot and icon and negatively how bad the pages that “only” present CMS content look. I don’t know whose fault this is and I don’t even care, it doesn’t matter for the end user. I’m sure the guys at Parsek will check these pages out and try to make changes that will make them better. When I first saw the design while I was still at Parsek I wasn’t sure if the title on the right would work but now that I’m surfing the page I actually think it does. There is one problem there though – if you visit this page (screenshot) you’ll see that you can see its title “About us” four times in a very small area. It’s nice to know where you are but isn’t this a little bit too much?
The next big redesign is the biggest Slovenian bank which redesigned their site after quite a while. I don’t really know what to say about the redesign – the last one was horrendous so this one is easy on the eye. It too got wider and restructured so people can find relevant information easier. The home page lists all the products for residents and businesses so you can access them directly.
If the design got overhauled the backend didn’t — if it did it got it fashion tips from the 90s. Validation returns a lot of errors and — prepare for a shock — the encoding is iso-8859-2. The number of non semantic elements is significant and inline scripts are there too (<SCRIPT language=JavaScript>).
The most interesting thing about the new page is the fact that it now uses “friendly URLs”. And how utterly broken they are. You could also say this page is a textbook case for how wrong things can go when you don’t think about them. So you’ll have two pages, one at /nalozbe-v-vrednostne-papirje and the other at /nalozbe-v-vrednostne-papirje1. I have no idea how that tells you anything about how the content behind these links is different. It would tell you more if the first was prefixed with /residential and the second one with /businesses.
Another funny thing I noticed is how banners are designed to look as if they weren’t images but rather just HTML parts of the page. The reason I noticed is that I was on the Mac while checking the page and since font rendering is different it looks really weird. I think I might have seen the same difference on Vista with ClearType on.
A couple of Slovenian newspaper sites redesigned recently (today?). I got the news on Twitter. I’ll try to review what they’ve done1.
Image via WikipediaFirst notified by had, I was eager to see the new design and code. The design is very very wide — a good link to the newspaper that is probably the widest/biggest in Slovenia. At 1024×768 you see all the content, but the banner on the side is missing — I hope they subtract these users when selling ad space (or they should get ToboAds that actually count only the ones that are seen by the user using advanced JavaScript).
The design is boring with only the RSS icons giving it some color. It gives no feedback on links, the font on the front page is too small (11px) and it doesn’t hold its text–resizing well. The content is a bit hard to read with the font size at 12px, width of 600px (50em) and line–height at normal. There doesn’t seem to be any vertical rhythm applied. It’s also very hard to figure out where you are in the structure since some of the navigational elements seem to vary in color for no apparent reason.
The underlying code is disappointing. It’s really something that you would just delete and start over. It suffers from inline styles, divitis, classitis, inline scripts, validation errors (163 for the front page) and overall ugliness. The front page needs 67 requests and 724kB to load in 3.24 seconds (there are a few banners on the site though). Disappointing but expected is the fact that they don’t use Microformats but I was positively surprised that you can use OpenID to log in — I’ve never left a comment on local news sites because you need to register with each one. And I never do.
Posted by Tomaž Štolfa it’s actually not available yetavailable now through www.mladina.si but can be accessed directly through www.mladina.si/dnevnik/. It’s a nice page but with a shift in concept — the magazine is a weekly publication while the online edition will publish daily (or probably all the time). It too is wider than the previous version with a width of 1024 leaning on the left side of the browser.
The design is nice and gives good feedback in use. It’s made on a simple 5—column grid with the 5th column being used only in the head and for the banner. The only thing that is quite annoying is the banner at the top that moves the whole page down another 90px for no good reason (at least not for the users?). The content is much easier to read with a 12px font size, 1.5em line–height at 563px width (~47em). It also makes use of few different typeface which adds to the overall experience of surfing. Vertical rhythm in text is achieved through crappy code with paragraphs being spaced with <br /> elements.
The code is nothing to look at. It has 71 validation error on the front page with the first ones starting in the head element (unclosed meta elements). It too sports inline styles and scripts (which are at least wrapped in CDATA) and it too suffers from a heavy infection of divitis. It even has some <center> tags that I haven’t seen for quite some time now. The front page loads in 2.54 seconds for 58 requests and 582kB with all requests except Google Analytics going to the same domain. Microformats are nonexistent and so is OpenID — no need to have registration if you can’t leave comments2.
Image via WikipediaThat’s the title of the talk by the first foreign speaker1 at Spletne urice — Richard Rutter from Clearleft, who’s really a great guy and a great speaker.
Web Typography is one of the topics I really care about and I think it’s an issue that iswas a bit overlooked in our local community. After my talk last year about fonts and possible ways to use / embed them I am happy that we got Richard to come to Slovenia to talk about this — who could be better than the author of The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.
The talk went great2 (Cyberpipe filled up after the first few minutes) and it was followed by a good Q&A session. In the session I mentioned that a font foundry released a font that is free for use on the web and thus free for embeding — the foundry is called FDI fonts.info — you can read their press release or download Graublau Sans Web and Logotypia Pro for free. After the talk we went for a beer in Metropol (just above Cyberpipe) and then another one later on in the city center.
All in all it was great having Richard here and I guess he liked it too. I hope he’ll put in a good word for us and we’ll get even more foreign speakers to come to Ljubljana and share their in–depth knowledge of specific areas of webdesign and development3.
I would also like to thank our silent sponsor Parsek Interactive that took care of the air fare and the hotel bill and also Zemanta that shared their work space with Richard today4.
A few days ago this blog celebrated its second birthday. It’s been a good year, with links to my article published by such notable authors as Luke Wroblewski and Ethan Marcotte – the same article was translated into Russian. The blog was also included in Planet Microformats.
I’ve written only 61 posts (down from 100 in the first year), gotten 134 comments (down from 155 in the first year) and more than 70.000 spam comments (up from 17.000). I have 56 subscribers according to FeedBurner, which is more than a 100% increase from 25 a year before.
Firefox is the dominant browser with 47%, Internet Explorer lost some market share and is down to 44% with Safari rising to 4% and Opera to 2.5%. Almost 90% of the visitors have Flash 9 installed, an additional 4.5% are stuck at Flash 8. Screens grew a bit with only 27% having 1024×768 or less (32% year before) and less than 2% 800×600 or less. Windows have a share of 85%, Mac OS 10%, Linux 4%.
Top content is still This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, Messing up the interface coming in at a distant second with merely a third of the visits.
I’ve had a redesign planned since day 1, but as usual it took quite some time to get here. Since I’m not a design I couldn’t just create a fancy look with everything else left the same. The idea was to shake everything up and try to come out with a layout that would be worth redoing everything. When I posted about what a TV network / news page should have when being redone I was also setting my own targets.
This goes without saying. All the pages should validate, although there might be some crap left.
I increased the width to 850px with the addition of 140px to the left used only for design purpose, not content. The main content is only 410px wide which means you can easily read this blog on devices like the Nokia n800.
Not really that relevant since the page only creates about 15 requests which might even decrease as I compact the JavaScript. There are a bunch of other requests made that are content related – images, Zemanta pixies, favicons…
Every page is supposed to be valid hAtom and the About section is an hCard with adr and geo. Links to others are of course XFNed. The about page is planned to be an hResume.
There’s no need to talk about blog compatibility and screensaving for banners. I don’t use OpenID there are no log-ins.
Markos recently pointed out the fact that not many pages on the internet make use of the possibility to change the page for different users and different context. This, of course, is not an easy job, especially if you’re doing heavy processing – doing this for each user might be a bit to heavy. It is something I think differentiates the internet from other media and should be used to provide a better user experience.
Returning visitors of this page will get special treatment. Since they’re coming back they don’t need to see the About section and they will also not have banners displayed.
People coming from search engines will see their query parsed into words that will be colored for easier findability. They will be able to switch them on and off and be able to repeat the same query on the internal search with the last option available only if the referrer was an external search engine.
Even though many blog themes have the same sidebar for all the pages (as did the previous one I used) this doesn’t follow the normal architecture rules. The sidebar is normally context specific – in my case a regular user reading a blog post will currently see nothing in it (while others will see the About and the Ads.
The page is set to a 7 unit grid, with units 60px wide with a 10px gutter in between. It’s also set to a baseline height of 18px that is respected throughout the page. Images and other non-text blocks on the page are corrected with JavaScript to a half of the unit (9px).
The links bar will try to retrieve the favicon of the link – if it succeeds it will use it instead of the default icon.
If you click on the Google Maps link in the About section they will open as small inline maps with a link to open them in a new window.
You might have noticed that post categories are nowhere to be found. I didn’t forget them I just found out that I’ve changed my categorizing pattern and had to rethink the display. I also wanted to add the Elsewhere section with links to or even content from other pages where pieces of me reside (Twitter, Flickr, Marela, Pownce, Facebook, LinkedIn, del.icio.us,…). Another thing missing is the Projects and Experiments sections, I’ll tackle these in a separate post sometime in the future…
