website design

There is a case being heard in a California courtroom at the moment that may have serious implications on the future of pure visual corporate/government websites built on technologies like Flash. There are a number of these websites like this around that typically comprise of a fairly featureless HTML wrapper page for an all-singing and dancing Flash animation. The class action lawsuit brought against Target Corp (the website owner) is on the grounds of its online store not meeting the same accessibility standards as their physical equivalents or California legal guidelines for shopping outlets. Whilst many Flash websites have an HTML equivalent for Target did not and consequently vision and physically impaired users could not purchase goods as screen readers and keyboard shortcuts do not work in Flash environments.

The cost of redesigning an old table/image based site around CSS can be outweighed by the bandwidth savings as associate art director for ESPN.com Mike Davidson points out:

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview

In the interview he explains the logic behind the ESPN.com redesign and the massive bandwidth savings they were able to achieve (approximately 730TB a year). Given the actual saving per hit was only 50Kb the huge overall bandwidth illustrates the magnitude of the Web space. Designing high-bandwidth sites with lots of images, table-based design or even worse Flash is just asking for trouble in the long-term if the ultimate objective is to create a popular site. It is no good generating lots of advertising revenue from page views if this traffic ends up costing far more.

The title pretty much explains everything. The SELECT form tag has a MULTIPLE option but in practice this turns very ugly very quickly. This little CSS hack provides the functionality of the tag without the user-interface nightmares.

 

The name is hard to say ten times fast but the demos, scripts and discussion is undenyably fantastic. Extremely useful for leading edge web-based interface scripts and ideas.

http://script.aculo.us/

A blog post from AgilePartners describes how upcoming web applications like Fluxiom achieve the dynamic image resizing effects illustrated in their promotional material. It turns out to be very simple (Javascript modifies the CSS image size property) yet the effect is really cool. True 'image resizing' is not employed, large images are downloaded to the browser and then it is left up to the browser's own display engine to perform the dynamic resizing. In a high bandwidth environment this does not matter but for people stuck in 56k modem land it is just one more nail in the coffin for their enjoyable Internet experience. There is almost a need now for web developers to be able to distinguish between low and high bandwidth users in the same way browser or Javascript detection is employed.