[thelist] Site Review; [was Apple helps web developers]

[aardvark]

> From: Jay Greenspan <jay at trans-city.com>
> > 
> > <http://developer.apple.com/internet/>
> 
> I had been mentally steeling myself -- through yoga, meditation, watching
> old episodes of Kung Fu -- to present this site to Evolt under the classic
> subject "Site Review". Beleive me, one does not present a Web devlopment
> site to this crowd without some trepidation.

aww, c'mon... we're not *that* bad... or were you talking to just me?

> I have been working with Developer Relations at Apple
> to build content for the site that addresses known
> cross-platform/cross-browser issues. The site also supports principles
> long-practiced by many on this list: thorough testing, adherence to
> standards (when possible), and degradablilty. This is just the start, and I
> know that Apple hopes this site will be helpful for the community.

in that case, making the site an example of such goals is always 
good karma... i've done that with my personal site (for the 3 people 
on the planet who care whether i code to standards or not), but it's 
not trying to be a resource like this...

> As for my role: I managed the content for the site. So, as it concerns this
> list, I'm most interested in the your opinions about the articles. But if
> you notice any design/layout/markup issues, I will make sure they get
> addressed.

i like the articles... they actually look like *research* was done... i 
especially like the detail you've gone into with the fonts section 
(screen caps and such)... it might be worth mentioning in that 
article that some 90% (?) of surfers are on wintel machines, and 
give that as a reason why developers on Macs should care... even 
if Mac developers think wintel users suck, their designs might be 
seen as ugly by those who don't know better, and a developer 
should be motivated by not making ugly...

good links in the articles, too... although i'd recommend targets 
and titles for the links... i had no idea one brought me to the next 
subsection, but another brought me off-site... turning visited links to 
orange is a bit bright, IMO, too...

using the 'Fonts' section to push people to the CSS section is 
always a good thing...

you could always use evolt.org as an example of compliant HTML 
(the templates) and CSS, with what we think is still a cool design... 
ho hum... anyway...

oh, and thanks for the link to the browser archive... and the list... 
and good way of avoiding qualifying any of them as better than the 
other ("...three of the more active communities on Web.")

the title image on 
http://developer.apple.com/internet/_html/doctype.html (Working 
with HTML) and all the pages in that section looks to be sized 
incorrectly...

so, no comments on design or HTML?  good, i haven't got much to 
say tonight (not feeling very critical, and it looks pretty good)... but 
if you do, just shout out... you know, to comment on lack of 'alt's 
(except on that horizontal rule) or accessibility features for the 
forms or stuffing <span> tags into <p> tags when the class or style 
could just be applied to the <p> or unquoted attributes or ...

...man, i really can't keep my mouth shut.  hope some of this was 
useful...