¶ BBC Broadcast has just released a newly designed version of its site. It looks really slick with a classy grid-based design that is valid XHTML and CSS underneath the hood.
The CSS doesn’t quite validate because of the proprietary opacity filters used to make the wonderful sliding menus transparent. Given that they are built on lists and work in Safari, Mozilla and IE I reckon it’s a more-than-worthwhile sacrifice.
Comments
1
It’s funny that you’ve brought this up today… There’s a big debate going on over at *asterisk about the usability of dropdowns. On top of that I’m currently freelancing at the BBC and I’m having to use font tags and spacer gifs for the first time in ages! Hopefully that standards-based rework of BBC Broadcast is a sign of things to come for the rest of the BBC…
Those are some pretty nifty dropdowns though…
2
Ah, for IE PNG support.
3
I’m currently building the new BBC jobs website and I’m trying to be as standards compliant as possible.
The BBC webdev guidelines are worth a look. They’re quite demanding, but in a slightly pass way: They talk about issues like page weight, usability, and link formatting al lot – ‘standards’ per se don’t seem to be on their radar.
Also, I’m having to build with no javascript whatsoever so thier ‘text version’ perl parser (Betsie) doesn’t fall over. A completely different page is offered to users of screen readers – laudable for it’s time, but these day their pages should be built to facilitiate these users in the first place.
And check out the BBC browser support matrix: “*Win IE4: Supported, need to test*”. Try styling an unordered list of links when you can’t apply widths or padding to links.
I’m with you on the font tags and spacers, Mike – I recoded the BBCi Global nav (that grey bar across the top) and cut page weight of the entire site by about 12% ...but it’s not quite as rock solid as the original, and I think I’m going to have to put it back :-(
4
Sorry, completely unrelated to the post, but under Mozilla Firefox on Win/XP, using the “Lucida fonts” or “Vera fonts” stylesheets, your fonts do not render correctly.
Is this just a M$ Windows weirdness?
5
In Opera 7 the buttons for the menu get wrapped onto seperate lines, which is pretty ugly – otherwise very nice.
6
Just a quick notice: if I have Javascript disabled, the menus don’t drop down (firefox, win).
Perhaps not perfect then.
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