March 11, 2004: No Soup revamped
About a month or so ago Thor pointed out that the University of Florida’s site had been updated and was now the first in the US (and, potentially, the world) to be stylized fully with CSS and, thus, free of formatting with tables. In addition, while it utilizes technologies such as flash for some components, it degrades nicely on systems that do not have them installed. On top of that, as Alex put it, it also looks nice. In all, it’s a beautiful thing and will probably get a lot of attention because of the significance of such a feat.
As viewed on the T|C.
Personally, I’m so happy this was finally done (nevermind the fact that it was done by the university I got my degrees from - even though that is pretty freaking cool) and wished I could have worked on the project or one similar to it. It’s a big deal to me as I am a big believer in web standards and get annoyed by the barrage of poorly-designed sites out there with horrible support for different media types. I’m also happy because Mark lead the process and he’s an awesome guy I know from my teaching days. Inspired by his team’s work, I went on my own mission and revamped my Listing of restaurants in Gainesville. Sure, it’s a far cry from the work involved in redoing UF’s site, but hey, it needed it and I had to do something to make me feel good about myself for the day.
So, what was the point? For starters I wanted to cleanup and simplify the code as this was my first project using PHP and the end result was a real beginner’s mess. More importantly, however, was to simplify the HTML generated and to allow for it to be better viewed by other types of browsers. The original site was a rather large table that required at least an 800-pixel window. The new design should dynamically adapt to screens as small as 240 pixels without any limitation on maximum width. In addition, each entry is delimited by a list item which should allow non-CSS capable browsers, text-based browsers, and certain handheld or phone browsers to view the data as a plain list.
Of course, it may still need a little work including the search capability I told myself I’d add years ago. Unfortunately, I’m too busy for that so this will have to do for now.
Comments or suggestions? Please shoot them my way.