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But then I would not be able to put gas in my hybrid to drive to the store to buy my Nabisco cookies.

Go ahead, just pull a company off the top of your head that "specializes" in AI. I dare you.

Duh.

Easy enough to apply, too!

I guess you're just not too bright!

As a longtime resdient of the city of brotherly filth, let me just say that the mind just fucking reels at that association.

I am from Glenview, Illinois, where Kraft has their HQ. They have a nice R&D plant right in the middle of town, and one time, when I was growing up (I was maybe 11 or 12), my friends and I took a little hike through the wooded area behind it. There was a large storm drain coming out of the plant that led into the North Branch of the Chicago River. What startled my friends and me was the presence of a few guys in biohazard suits scribbing the walls of it off with a high-pressure hose of some kind. Whatever the secret ingredient is for their cream cheese, I hope it doesn't produce whatever they were scrubbing down!

blame America's financial problems on "The war on terror", what the hell about the expensive food, cloths, cars, houses, and other crap your favorite liberal democrat enjoys paid for by his government check coming from tax dollars??? you cant blame everything on Bush and conservative republicans...

Um, maybe because the expensive food, cloths, cars, houses, and other crap provides something back to the national industry, which is hard to say about the war on terror. Besides those government contractors that like to go around overcharging for their services, of course.

There's a fairly comprehensive history of Kraft's mergers and acquistitions here and related pages. It would appear that Suchard Jacobs was integrated in 1990. (After gobbling up many other companies including Tobler, the makers of Toblerone, since 1970.) I grew up in Geneva and Suchard was every day chocolate, like Hershey, but I always preferred Tobler's offerings. The one that shocked me recently was seeing the Nestle logo on a box of After Eights instead of Rowntree. ;-)

But why does the chocolate company NEED the French site ?

In order to fill a gap in Europe?

• www.milka.at (Austria)
• www.milka.be (Belgium)
• www.milka.de (Germany)
• www.milka.es (Spain)
• www.milka.fr (France) - bad!
• www.milka.gr (Greece)
• www.milka.co.il (Ireland)
• www.milka.it (Italy)
• www.milka.lu (Luxemburg)
• www.milka.nl (Netherlands)
• www.milka.com.pt (Portugal)
• www.milka.co.uk (United Kingdom)

Note that they don't have most of the nordic countries nor the new members of the EU. Hint: many of these domains are open for registration!

Most of these sites redirect to the corresponding Kraft Foods site for that country, or to the globak www.kraft.com.

I hope they did not spill any Tang.

The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.

Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.

They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.

Same thing. Looks fine here.

The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.

I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?

They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.

Uh..yeah? So?

From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.

I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...

They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.

The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.

They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.

This is true.

It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.

True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.

I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.

There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.

Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):

ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.

HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).

Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.

RCA. Rollover menus from hell.

Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).

BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.

Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.

So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.

There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.

Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top. :-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.

It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.

Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.

You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.

You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.

You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.

You use Javascript for normal links

Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.

On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.

Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs. :-)

Kraft has one meaning at the moment, however Craft has two distinct meanings (ability to shape things, and vehicle).

AC.

Keebler is owned by NABISCO!

Keebler.com's brands page, I see no evidence of any affiliation with Kraft Foods, Nabisco's parent company. In turn, Kraft's parent company is Altria.

I don't buy Nabisco because 1. I don't like to support big tobacco and big booze (two other divisions of Altria), and 2. I simply prefer Keebler's products to Nabisco's.

see, the thing is I liken this to the new river free press, where I live. I'm a fairly liberal person. But this news monthly puts me to shame. It is more left field than any politician I can think of. Anyway, in December's issue they had a list of products to boycott this christmas season. Some of them were legit, but some of them were outrageous. Example: Boycott everything made by Kraft Foods because the cows they milk for cheese get fed Bovine Growth Hormone. Now, point one: my girlfriend is in vet school, she has a degree in animal science specializing in beef production. According to her, BGH has *never* been proven to have ill side effects in humans or animals, but just in case, there's a period surrounding milking/ slaughter that they can't feed them BGH. Point two: The new river free press is read by *AT LEAST* 7,000 people. Even if EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM told 100 other people, and 700,000 people boycotted kraft, it wouldn't hurt them. You know why? Market share. how many of these brands do you buy?.

It's the same thing with blizzard. That was my point. A boycott would do no good. Even if everyone on slashdot participated.