Slashdot CSS Redesign Winner Announced

The winner of the contest is Alex Bendiken. He will receive a new laptop as well as bragging rights as the creator of the new look of Slashdot. You can see his winning design in a near complete form now. Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues. We plan to take this live in the next few days. There will undoubtedly be a few minor glitches, but please submit bug reports and we'll sort it out as fast as possible. Also congratulations to Peter Lada, our runner up. He gets $250 credit at ThinkGeek. Thanks to everyone who participated- it was a lot of fun.

Comments

not that pretty..

[nuzak]

But at least it's using CSS throughout, so it can be customized more easily. The current CSS use is quite haphazard, so while this new look isn't very impressive on the surface, it's a vast improvement underneath.

Re:New, harder to read version

[JMemmert]

*chuckles* Quite the contrary. Or maybe not.
It seems that people have a much harder time reading sans-serif fonts on paper than serif fonts. On the computer screen, however, the opposite applies.
Here's a study about it http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm (Google is your friend).
And this is a quote from the Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif#Usage:
"The coarse resolution of computer screens has caused a reassessment of the role of serifs in readability, with a large percentage of web pages employing sans-serif type for body text. Fonts with hinting information, anti-aliased rendering and the ClearType rendering technology has partially mitigated these concerns, yet the basic problem of coarse resolution--typically 100 pixels per inch or less--continues to impose strict limitations on readability and legibility on-screen." And yes, in the end, it boils down to personal preferences.

Re:A small Criticism

[gregbains]

I'm using Firefox 1.5 up to date and clicking the triangles for me opens and closes sections.

Re:Where?

[mizhi]

Ok, I give up. Where's the collapsable sections??

You have to click the section headers (don't click the Vendors link). It doesn't give you a very good indication that there's any sort of functionality hooked into those headers.

Re:Light mode?

[idonthack]

Don't worry. The way those prefrences work is by removing stylesheets. The contest is to redesign the stylesheets. You won't be affected because you won't load them anyways.

Turn in Slacker Credentials at the Door

[bill_mcgonigle]

absofuckinglutely stupid unless you're blind and using a screen reader

You greatly underestimate how much like Work Slashdot looks in an 80x25 terminal with amber or green on black text.

Buttons look cramped in Opera 9 beta 1

[MagicM]

The text on the buttons looks a little cramped in Opera 9 beta 1. screenshot

Re:I agree. The runner-up seems FAR better.

[FireFury03]

I don't see why it would be difficult to have multiple versions of the site, one of which could be a text browser-friendly one (didn't there used to be a twin page like that?).

Having multiple versions of the site starts to become a administator's nightmare because of the overhead of keeping all the various versions working. Less of a problem when the content is all pulled from a DB like Slashdot is.

But this is what XSLT is for - serve up the content in XML and have the browser apply the XSLT stylesheet client-side. This has the added side effect of reducing bandwidth usage since you're not shifting the styling and layout data over the network every time the page is loaded.

The icky problem with XSLT at the moment, is that whilest all the mainstream browsers (even IE) support it, there's no way for the server to tell whether the browser is capable since there is no header the browser is required to set if it is.

In any case, if your web site doesn't work in both modern browsers and text browsers then you must be truely clueless when it comes to web design.

Use elements that are applicable to the *type* of content (i.e. tables are used to output tabular data, not to position random stuff on the screen. Menus can be presented as unordered lists, etc.). Then style those elements to give you the visual effect you need. Text-only browsers can discard the styling data and they still get to see the content - the correct use of elements gives the browser good hints as to how to display the data. Small-screen devices such as PDAs can select a different stylesheet.

And if you're expecting everyone to have Javascript then your site is very badly broken - Javascript-only features cause serious usability problems (for example, they may force someone to open something in a pop-up window when they don't want to). Javascript is an *enhancement* - build your site without it and then if you want to add *optional* enhancements then write some Javascript that modifies the DOM tree to add hooks to the right elements.

Interestingly, if your corporate website doesn't meet the W3 accessibility guidelines then (depending on your location) you may be breaking the law - many parts of the world have laws that prevent businesses from discriminating against the disabled. These often extend to corporate websites and large organisations have been sued for sizable chunks of cash for ignoring these laws.