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ajt (2546)

ajt
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http://www.iredale.net/

UK based. Perl, XML/HTTP, SAP, Debian hacker.

  • CPAN: ATRICKETT [cpan.org]
  • PerlMonks: ajt [perlmonks.org]
  • Local LUG: AdamTrickett [lug.org.uk]
  • Debian Administration: ajt [debian-adm...ration.org]
  • LinkedIn: drajt [linkedin.com]

Journal of ajt (2546)

Saturday February 14, 2004
04:47 PM

Good web design is possible

[ #17419 ]

While hunting round the WebStandards site I spotted a link to a revised version of the UK's awful train timetable site. At first I assumed it was a demo, there have been quite a few makeovers of high profile sites with poor HTML, such as Slashdot and UseIT*.

However, it's not a demo, but a functional version of the site. If you want to find out about train times in the UK I heartily recommend this site, instead of the official one!

* When I googled for this link, it appears that there have been competitions to do this before, but link here is the one I was thinking of.


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  • If you live near an Odeon cinema, his accessible odeon website [dracos.co.uk] is very very useful.

    -Dom

    • I find it so depressing that companies and organisations waste monopoly money budgets on awful web sites.

      Large companies spend silly ammounts, and end up with utter rubbish. It's annoying as it's the end user that picks up the cost in poor usability and/or higher product prices, and good designers go without contracts.

      For non-proftit organisations and charities, it's money that could be better spent that is wasted. That makes me sad and reluctant to donante to organisations I feel do actual good in the

      --
      -- "It's not magic, it's work..."
      • Whilst many companies are continuing to throw out crap web sites, I think that things are on the whole getting better. The vanguard of use web standards and accessibility means that a lot more sites are coming out with vastly improved markup and a lot less JavaScript.

        I was commenting to a web designer not two nights ago about how much easier it has been to use lynx on most web sites in the past year or so. He agreed and was saying how much easier web design was getting now CSS support was better and you

        • I can't agree more that good design is possible. There are also quite a few good examples too, but while it may be getting better, I don't think it's that noticeable yet.

          The comment about CSS support is a bit of red-herring really, Mozilla, Opera 6/7 and IE6 have been available for quite a few years now, and their standard support is about as good as it gets. Safari is new to the party, so doesn't count for my argument, but IE on the Mac was a good browser. The XHTML and CSS specs are also a number of ye

          --
          -- "It's not magic, it's work..."
          • Whilst the techology has remained largely the same for a while, I think attitudes amongst designers are changing. This is largely due to the fact that more and more people do have access to a 5th generation browser which lets you use all the nice features of the standards.

            This has changed things from the $$$ side of things. Before the 5th generation browsers where so widely available, you would lose a lot of customers if you designed using web standards. Now, they're widely supported, you can spend les

            • I agree that it's a change in attitude of designers, but I still contend that the technology has been available for a long while already, and that the designers are lagging behind the browsers, not because the technology isn't available, but because designers either don't know how to code to standards, or because they are too conservative.

              I accept that people can tend to be conservative, when it's their job at stake, but as Zeldman points out hybrid designs are possible, that look good, are accessible/usa

              --
              -- "It's not magic, it's work..."
        • Whilst there will always be some holdouts ...

          What, you mean non-compliant sites like mine [cantrell.org.uk]? :-)

          It's remaining non-compliant because I lack the motivation to fart around with web shit when I could be doing something more interesting like drinking beer.

          • While your site is Invalid [w3.org], it doesn't use crap, so it works. I like my xhtml to be valid which helps get a predictable behaviour, but it's more important not to abuse technology, just to get a specific effect that is fragile and unnecessary.

            The things I really hate are the unnecessary things, e.g. the xhtml/css/DOM/Javascript tricks that add something you don't really need, and only work under a limited set of conditions, for examples browser sniffing Javascript.

            Your site may be invalid html, but it wo

            --
            -- "It's not magic, it's work..."
  • Several of this fine gentleman's works have been mentioned in NTK.
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