Weblog entry:
- Harvard.edu, redux.
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As with everything on my site: it’s up, it’s semi-buggy, etc., etc. You know: the usual caveats apply.
I’ve posted a standards-based redesign of the Harvard University homepage that I referenced in my my presentation on web standards last week (the brave/bored can access all my notes if they’re interested); it’s only a proof-of-concept, and hasn’t been tested in all the browsers it should’ve been. I’m guessing that my overly nested floats are breaking Mac IE 5x, and I know my use of
margin: 0 auto;
is going to snaff up IE5.x. If time allows, I’ll iron out these bugs.But again, it’s a proof-of concept — and I think/hope, a powerful one. Especially when you consider that the markup of the standards-based version is 50% lighter than the current page. Especially when you consider the accessibility improvements of media-neutral markup over the original HTML.
Sure, there’re things that I would’ve loved to have done to the original design1, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. And like I said, bugs are still prevalent. But while it’s not perfect or production-ready, I hope it’s a start.
1 Changing all those image-based navigation elements to resizeable text leaps immediately to mind. Yeesh.
There’s a WordPress issue that’s currently preventing old comments from displaying correctly. Sorry for the inconvenience, but hopefully we’ll be back online soon.