[thelist] Site check

[Craig]

Hi Diane,

Thanks for replying.

> I peeked at it in Firebird on Mac.

I've never had any feedback from Mac users, I hope the layout looked
"correct".

> First impression: Information overload. Needs whitespace.

Yes, that's a valid point, I will try to space it out a bit.  I think there
may be too many bullets as well.

> Show/hide thingies are fun to play with but unnecessary.

um, they can be handy because they use cookies to remember if it's hidden or
not, sort of to only show you what you want to be shown if you've been to
the page before and have previously hidden a section.

> Style-switch is fun to play with but my personal opinion is that
> style-switch is pointless unless it solves a problem (same for the
> show/hide thingies.) Zeldman's site does it pretty well, offering a
> higher contrast style for people with LCD screens who find the default
> too difficult to read.

The Style-switch is only new, and I'm probably not using it to it's full
potential. I sort of made it because the default style of the site was a
dark green, so I wanted to make a style that had a white background and
lighter colours.

>From a usability point of view, I've specified the font's in % so you can
change the font size (with your browser). I may look at using the
Style-switcher to change some of the fonts from Tahoma to something else.

> Not specifically your problem, but why do Mozilla browsers tend to
> truncate the lower portion of list images, making you have to refresh
> to see them complete?

I've noticed that, but have never been able to find out what causes it. As
you know a refresh fixes it, but that's really not good enough as they
should show the first time.

> Code: Serious case of class-itis and spacer gif-itis, and you have to
> know folks on the list will not have kind words to say about the
> 1997-era table-spacer layout method.

I can never get a good looking cross-browser CSS design, it's just me :)  I
stick with tables because I am fairly confident that they will be rendered
in a similar way in most browsers.

> Even staying with tables, a more
> up-to-date use of css (use of descendent selectors, and css instead of
> spacers for example) could reduce the file-size significantly (+50%).

Do you have any links with information regarding this, I could look at?

> Also, if you rearranged your table code (see diveintoaccessibility.org)
> you could put your more important content closer to the top (search
> engines and non-graphical users favor this because you don't have to
> wade through inches of links and sidebar stuff to get to the meat of
> the content). You could also accomplish this with CSS layouts, too.

I will look into it!

> I will commend you for using alt attributes on your images. And the
> shiny, plastic style is attractive.

Thanks :)

> Diane

I appreciate your comments and will implement some of the changes you have
suggested.

Regards,
Craig.