Breaking news makes the case for standards

Friday | October 31, 2003 | 9:03 am  

E-media Tidbits has an item about how the San Diego Union-Tribune was swamped as the nation hit their servers to find out about the wildfires.

Just a friendly reminder from Waspy the standards bug: Standards-based layouts save you bandwith!

Some sites, like CNN, already have a stripped down version ready for breaking news events that might swamp their servers.

But if you already use standards-based layouts:

You’ll save bandwith now.

The level of traffic at which you might have to switch to a stripped-down version will be higher.

You could switch to the light layout easier by making changes to a global stylesheet.

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Taking a liking to digital replicas?

Wednesday | October 29, 2003 | 1:49 pm  

The News Hour has a piece about how more users and publishers are taking to digital replica editions.

I haven’t personally used them, but I’ve seen demos. I don’t particularly like them. As a designer, I think they suffer from some usability issues.

But if some readers do like to use them, then this is a case where both the business side and the users can win.

I’m going to venture a guess, that digital replica users are most likely converts from the print product — probably in the older demographic range. If that’s the case, I can understand why they’re taking to them.

As an industry, we’ve trained generations of readers about our print edition’s user interface. The replica editions leverage the users past experience (albeit with some differences) with the ease of digital delivery.

I know some folks in the industry don’t like the replica editions — but in keeping with my different strokes view of electronic publishing, I say why not have them as an option.

A replacement for a Web site (and RSS feeds, and e-mail, and whatever comes next) — no. A product in addition to a traditional Web site — why not?

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Two points

Wednesday | October 29, 2003 | 11:32 am  

Ok, three.

I’m still alive, but busy. I’m hoping to post more regularly soon. I’m working on a big project at work that I hope to announce soon, and I’m also working on a big personal project… stay tuned for details

What Do I Know, a fellow Atlantan, makes a good observation: There’s no Verdana and Georgia with IEMac. Two fonts that us Web design folks have taken for granted may soon disappear from our toolbox. Mac users are moving to Safari, and in Panther you don’t have to install IE. Also, M$ plans to move IE to a pay model, so even future users may not have those fonts installed…

I’m just starting to get to know Pharrot, but these numbers (courtesy PHP Everywhere) make me feel even better about the future of PHP. Some folks seem to think PHP can’t scale (not so). That issue aside, interpreted languages do have a potential for bottlenecking in the fact that they’re parsed each time. Caching helps, but the idea behind Pharrot really excites me.

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