[WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Not sure if this has been flagged up anywhere else, but I noticed the barclays website has had a CSS makeover: http://www.barclays.co.uk/. It's great to see a huge company like this hauling themselves into the 21st century web-wise, and maybe it will be a kick up the backside for other less forward-thinking banks. They also have some (brief) information about their design here: http://www.barclays.co.uk/accessibility/web_design.htm regards Chris Taylor Senior Web Developer --- Egton A division of EMIS Leading Providers of ICT Infrastructure, Applications and Value Added Services Tel: 0113 2031636 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.egton.net http://www.egton.net/ --- Privileged and/or Confidential information may be contained in this message. If you are not the original addressee indicated in this message (or responsible for delivery of the message to such person), you may not copy or deliver this message to anyone. In such case, please delete this message, and notify us immediately. Opinions, conclusions and other information expressed in this message are not given or endorsed by my firm nor can I conclude contracts on its behalf unless otherwise indicated by an authorised representative independently of this message. Egton reserves the right to monitor, intercept and (where appropriate) read all incoming and outgoing communications. By replying to this message and where necessary you are taken as being aware of and giving consent to such monitoring, interception and reading. Egton is a division of Egton Medical Information Systems Limited. Registered in England. No 2117205. Registered Office: Park House Mews, 77 Back Lane, Off Broadway, Horsforth, Leeds, LS18 4RF ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
At 01:19 AM 9/7/2005, Chris Taylor wrote: Not sure if this has been flagged up anywhere else, but I noticed the barclays website has had a CSS makeover: http://www.barclays.co.uk/. It's great to see a huge company like this hauling themselves into the 21st century web-wise, and maybe it will be a kick up the backside for other less forward-thinking banks. They also have some (brief) information about their design here: http://www.barclays.co.uk/accessibility/web_design.htm Yes, it is good to see... and at the same time dispiriting to see markup like this: _ pbTaking time over design/bbr We#146;re always looking for ways to improve our web sites and online services and make them br easier to use, following principles laid down by the a href=wai_disclaimer.htm target=_blank title=Web Accessibility Initiative (opens in new window)Web Accessibility Initiative/a (WAI) and the br a href=rnib_disclaimer.htm target=_blank title=Royal National Institute for the Blind (opens in new window)Royal National Institute for the Blind/a (RNIB). We also set our own guidelines. /p pbOur guidelines include:/b/p _ Note the use of br tags to force carriage returns, the inline HTML b styling, and the use of a target=_blank new-window link to take you to the Web Accessibility Initiative! Staggering into the future, Paul ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
How abiut this then: div class=topBarGrad/div div class=contentContainer div class=contentContainerPad div class=breadCrumbstrongUK/strong/div div class=topTabs div class=topTabsValign div class=tabContainer div class=posAbsolutea href=http://www.barclays.co.uk/personal; title=Personal Bankingimg src=images_new/home/spacer.gif class=tabButton alt= //a/div They might have gone the CSS-route but it's pretty obvious they are clueless when it come to writing semantic markup. The sheer amount of div's and classes on the titlepage alone is simply bewildering ;-) Cheers, Erwin heiser ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Barclays (http://www.barclays.co.uk/accessibility/web_design.htm) Designing the site for an 800x600 view so horizontal scrolling is not required, even for users with small screens. Interesting to see that in Firefox I have a horizontal scroll bar and my resolution is 1280x1024 px However, at least they've attempted a standards based site. Paul. ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Exactly. Just because it validates doesn't mean it's semantic. topBarGrad topTabs topTabsValign - what if we move these away from the top. Then what? contentContainerPad - what if we remove the padding? posAbsolute - what if we change this to position:relative? HTML elements should define the information, not presentation. -- Kris Khaira http://kriskhaira.com ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
On 9/7/05, Kris Khaira [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - what if we move these away from the top. Then what? What if you have a div with id brand which contains your company's name in an h1 with id company_name? What if a later reorganization of the site moves that h1 into a different container element? The what if we move that over there argument against naming page elements has always seemed somewhat strange to me; I understand perfectly well that in an idealized world, a given page's HTML structure would effectively be set in stone and only the CSS layout would ever change, and so the above would never be a problem. But... In the real world, redesigns often involve a change in structure as well as in layout. Maybe there's an expanded about blurb or mission statement that now needs to go on each page. Maybe there's another sidebar to add. Maybe there's a new type of content to account for. These are all things that come up in an overwhelming number of redesigns, and all of them cause shuffling of the underlying structure as well as of the visual CSS layout. HTML elements should define the information, not presentation. Imagine a page with divs named header, sidebar and footer. Do those only convey information about the visual position of the elements? Or do they also convey some sense of the structure of the page? There's no clear line between semantic and presentational element labeling that I can see, so these things must be taken on a case-by-case basis; for example, posAbsolute is pretty clearly presentational, but topTabs is a bit fuzzier. The only hard and fast rule is that there are no hard and fast rules. -- May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. -- George Carlin ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Chris Taylor wrote: Not sure if this has been flagged up anywhere else, but I noticed the barclays website has had a CSS makeover: http://www.barclays.co.uk/. They also have some (brief) information about their design here: http://www.barclays.co.uk/accessibility/web_design.htm Chris Taylor Deleting the font-sizes throughout the style sheet makes it readable and breaks it. Regards, David Laakso -- David Laakso http://www.dlaakso.com ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
My guess is that more than one person worked on the redesign, but not everyone knew what they were doing. That might be where the mistakes come in. Still, they are really amateur mistakes. Seems unfair that I can't get anyone to pay me to do clean, standards based design, but these clowns cashed in on bed and breakfast tags. On 9/7/05, David Laakso [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Chris Taylor wrote:Not sure if this has been flagged up anywhere else, but I noticed the barclays website has had a CSS makeover: http://www.barclays.co.uk/.They also have some (brief) information about their design here: http://www.barclays.co.uk/accessibility/web_design.htmChris TaylorDeleting the font-sizes throughout the style sheet makes it readable andbreaks it.Regards,David Laakso --David Laaksohttp://www.dlaakso.com**The discussion list forhttp://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help**
RE: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
It doesn't actually validate. (watch wrap) http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.barclays.co.uk%2Fpremier%2Fcharset=%28detect+automatically%29doctype=Inlineverbose=1 http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.barclays.co.uk%2Fcharset=%28detect+automatically%29doctype=Inlineverbose=1 You've got to blame the web development company for this one. We had a similar issue (before I started here) where the organisation I work for demanded s 'standards compliant site redesign'. Unfortunately no one in the team was code savvy enough to police it and in the end we got an old school broken tables in tables in tables layout with a 40Kb stylesheet to semi-control layout. The developers answer to making it 'standards compliant' was to add a DOCTYPE, which none of the code actually fits. Now it's part of my job to try and clean up some of their mess and make it validate. Standards compliance needs to be built into RFP's from the get-go and then enforced by companies who pay the web-dev's. You have been warned ;) Paul ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Standards compliance needs to be built into RFP's from the get-go and then enforced by companies who pay the web-dev's. Exactly. I was actually thinking the other day, browsers should be more like compilers... they should refuse to parse incorrect code. Then the enforcement would be on the output end, too. An example of bad code: http://web1temp.cheme.cornell.edu/courses/cheme112/ Whoever made that site is basically having their bad code justified by browsers that actually display it, even though it has no doctype, no html tag, no head tag, unclosed p tags... etc etc etc. If that person was doing the same thing in Java or C++, the compiler would spit out a bunch of wierd messages and he/she would realize he/she doesn't know what he/she's doing. If browsers didn't parse bad code, that would probably stop a lot of xangas and myspaces from working... I can dream, can't I? No html tag! I can't get over that one!
RE: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
by-the-by: I am a web development student at Yeronga TAFE college in Brisbane, Australia. One of my instructors has never heard of DOCTYPE, refuses to put tags in lowercase and also refuses to close p, 'cause they don't need to be closed. From: Christian Montoya [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 8 September 2005 8:44 AMTo: wsg@webstandardsgroup.orgSubject: Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign Standards compliance needs to be built into RFP's from the get-go and then enforced by companies who pay the web-dev's. Exactly. I was actually thinking the other day, browsers should be more like compilers... they should refuse to parse incorrect code. Then the enforcement would be on the output end, too. An example of bad code: http://web1temp.cheme.cornell.edu/courses/cheme112/Whoever made that site is basically having their bad code justified by browsers that actually display it, even though it has no doctype, no html tag, no head tag, unclosed p tags... etc etc etc. If that person was doing the same thing in Java or C++, the compiler would spit out a bunch of wierd messages and he/she would realize he/she doesn't know what he/she's doing. If browsers didn't parse bad code, that would probably stop a lot of xangas and myspaces from working... I can dream, can't I?No html tag! I can't get over that one!
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Exactly. I was actually thinking the other day, browsers should be more like compilers... they should refuse to parse incorrect code. Then the enforcement would be on the output end, too. It would be nice, but would only work if -every- browser did it. Otherwise the general opinion would be This new 'Standards Compliant' browser is broken! Luckilly IE still works.
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
Exactly. I was actually thinking the other day, browsers should be more like compilers... they should refuse to parse incorrect code. Then the enforcement would be on the output end, too. It would be nice, but would only work if -every- browser did it. Otherwise the general opinion would be This new 'Standards Compliant' browser is broken! Luckilly IE still works. If you have XHTML, and serve it as application/xml. then in modern browsers you'll get your wish :-) Of course, you'll have problems with IE as well, regardless of whether it is valid or not. :-/ john John Allsopp style master :: css editor :: http://westciv.com/style_master support forum :: http://support.westciv.com blog :: dog or higher :: http://blogs.westciv.com/dog_or_higher Web Essentials web development conference http://we05.com ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
If you serve your XHTML pages as XML documents then your browser will die on badly formed structure. - A From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Christian Montoya Sent: Thursday, 8 September 2005 10:44 a.m. To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign Standards compliance needs to be built into RFP's from the get-go and then enforced by companies who pay the web-dev's. Exactly. I was actually thinking the other day, browsers should be more like compilers... they should refuse to parse incorrect code. Then the enforcement would be on the output end, too. An example of bad code: http://web1temp.cheme.cornell.edu/courses/cheme112/ Whoever made that site is basically having their bad code justified by browsers that actually display it, even though it has no doctype, no html tag, no head tag, unclosed p tags... etc etc etc. If that person was doing the same thing in Java or C++, the compiler would spit out a bunch of wierd messages and he/she would realize he/she doesn't know what he/she's doing. If browsers didn't parse bad code, that would probably stop a lot of xangas and myspaces from working... I can dream, can't I? No html tag! I can't get over that one!
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
by-the-by: I am a web development student at Yeronga TAFE college in Brisbane, Australia. One of my instructors has never heard of DOCTYPE, refuses to put tags in lowercase and also refuses to close p, 'cause they don't need to be closed. That instructor has no business teaching web dev, as good instructors continue their education after finding a job, and that one seems to have stopped learning new things 6 years ago. Sorry. Venting. Annoying client. *sigh*
RE: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
be glad you're learning about web standards now - it'll make getting a good job a lot easier. The capability of my tutors wasn't much better than yours. Even Zeldman has lamented lately (sorry - googled and couldn't find the entry) that Universities can teach molecular physics but apparently are unable to teach standards-compliant web design. *sigh* ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Barclays standards redesign
On 8 Sep 2005, at 9:31 AM, Paul Bennett wrote: be glad you're learning about web standards now - it'll make getting a good job a lot easier. The capability of my tutors wasn't much better than yours. Even Zeldman has lamented lately (sorry - googled and couldn't find the entry) that Universities can teach molecular physics but apparently are unable to teach standards-compliant web design. ...which just goes to prove the value of the Web itself as a community - and of lists like this. To paraphrase that old saw again: 'Those that can, do - and share. Those that can't, just get in the way.' BTW, just out of interest, I searched JZ's site for 'physics' with his internal search (Atomz?) and got only 3 references - to 'fiasco'. Kinda apt, though... N ___ Omnivision. Websight. http://www.omnivision.com.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
