A matter of Style

The WTH Remix con­test has ended and the win­ners have been announced, show­ing that some­times, the net com­mu­nity can do bet­ter than stan­dards cre­ator. The grand prize win­ner is a visu­ally arrest­ing page (com­pared to the orig­i­nal) that has only a few small things miss­ing in order to make it perfect.

First of all, I would ensure that all the links have proper titles, some­thing that a lot of peo­ple tend to for­get when design­ing pages but which can be use­ful for dis­abled users. Sec­ond, I would replace the val­i­da­tion logos with a much friend­lier CSS only alter­na­tive, sim­i­lar to what some have done with the XML button.

Sec­ond, I would put the A-to-Z ele­ments in a list, as they should prop­erly be. This would also take care of clearly dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing them instead of using a CSS trick to hide spe­cial characters.

The descrip­tive text about the con­sor­tium is needed on the page and could go above the news sec­tion in that design in order to match the exist­ing infor­ma­tion avail­able on the page and the proper RDF tags would need to be rein­serted in the page to ensure its con­tin­ued pro­gres­sion with the seman­tic web.

Last but not least would be a change of color in the mast­head to align with the exist­ing color set pre­sented by the orig­i­nal W3C logo (basi­cally chang­ing the site’s pri­mary color from orange to blue).

A very good effort and I hope that the peo­ple at the W3C will con­sider mov­ing to that new design. How­ever, the redesign also points to a big issue with the exist­ing site: not only is its wrong page bor­ing, in com­par­i­son to what can be done using the lat­est stan­dards, but there is also a cer­tain incon­sis­tency in the way sub-pages and sub-section of the site are pre­sented. While the exist­ing front page pro­vides a lot of infor­ma­tion, there does not seem to be any over­ar­ch­ing design thought in the way each sub­set is orga­nized, with some pages look­ing as if they came from the web in 1993, 1995, and late 90s-earlyish 2000s. Maybe the con­sor­tium should con­sider devel­op­ing a style guide for its over­all site. After all, shouldn’t the site be an exam­ple of how stan­dards can be imple­mented and still look pro­fes­sional? On that end, the W3C still falls short and it would be nice to see them doing some work in that direction.