WSA Winner
Monday April 26th, 2004
My first impression of "GUI Galaxy":http://www.guigalaxy.com/ was "slick". The colour scheme is pleasing, the design is tight and I love the subtle detailing like the icons and nav bar. Also you've gotta love the robot illustrations. Like many other "design":http://www.pixelsurgeon.com/ "portal":http://www.designiskinky.net/index_main.html "sites":http://www.surfstation.lu/, "GUI Galaxy":http://www.guigalaxy.com makes liberal use of iFrames. This would usually be a huge turn off for me, however, considering this sites target audience (tech savvy designers) I'm willing to let my gut feeling about iFrames slide this one time. So on the whole, this beautifully designed standards based site is well deserving a silver star. Great Stuff.
Reviewed by Andy Budd
#1
The only gripe I have with this site is that I feel it is too wide, as my normal browser window has to be expanded. I am on a 1024*768 screen, and I usually have my browser window open as far as I can and still be able to see my Buddy List on the top right corner... The horrible life I lead.
Also, the iFrames feel a bit cramped to me.
Besides that, it is a fine site.
Posted by Danny Cohen :: April 26th, 2004 at 01:35 PM
#2
Nice illustrations.
However, when I see iframes, I tend immediately to think "bad design". As far as websites are concerned, I tend to include search engine optimisation in my consideration of what's good design. Frames, as far as I'm concerned, are bad for SEO.
A related problem with the framed pages:
if someone arrives via a search engine at the actual content of this site - in other words, if someone ends up on one of the framed pages on the homepage without the frames displaying - they're unable to navigate to the rest of the site. There's no navigation from the (unframed) framed pages to accommodate this possibility.
Although it seems to validate with it's XHTML 1.0 Strict doctype, according to the W3C's validator, I was under the impression that the use of the 'target', 'name', 'marginwidth', 'frameborder' etc etc attributes were prohibited after XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Any comments?
There's a remark somewhere on the site that, although the site won't fully validate, anyone in the know knows that full compliance isn't really necessary. I guess that depends not only on the standards by which you're judging the site, but also the points on which it fails to validate. With regard to the criteria used to judge this site, may I ask what the connection between tech savvy designers and iframes is that makes use of the latter okay this time, when, presumably, at other times it would not be okay?
The site looks very nice. Not sure whether a standards award is in order, though.
Posted by Martin :: April 26th, 2004 at 02:30 PM
#3
I am relatively new on the scene of web standards compliant web sites, and have a long way to go, but I must say I agree with Martin. The main frameset page caries the proper doctype and validates... but do any of the frame pages?... I don't know, maybe they don't need to validate... but as Martin said I am not sure whether a standards award is in order.
Thanks
Posted by Aaron Boeving :: April 26th, 2004 at 06:46 PM
#4
Aaron's spot-on with what he's suggesting about the frame pages. They don't even have a doctype specified. Moreover, the actual HTML for each of those pages is, with all due respect, an old-school soup of s, s and s.
I can only presume that the judge didn't take the time to look at the frame pages' HTML - possibly because, as he himself says, they're usually such a turn-off for him?
Sorry to be a naysayer, but surely this site has some way to go before it can be placed alongside the likes of www.whatdoiknow.org as an exemplar of web standards, hasn't it?
Posted by Martin :: April 26th, 2004 at 10:19 PM
#5
That's supposed to read:
"...an old-school soup of TD, LEFTMARGIN and BR tags".
Posted by Martin :: April 26th, 2004 at 10:21 PM
#6
That's strange. I'm not sure why iFrames were used here... I totally agree that the HTML IFrame tag is a bad idea. (for many reasons) Can't a standards complient iFrame effect can be achieved with CSS like this?
Posted by Nick :: April 27th, 2004 at 01:34 AM
#7
figureground.com/cssiframes/
Posted by Nick :: April 27th, 2004 at 01:35 AM
#8
Nick, dude, how do you get it so there is only a vertical scroll bar and no horizontal scroll bar?. Is it because in the overflow you did auto, and not scroll?
Posted by dcohen :: April 27th, 2004 at 02:43 AM
#9
Well yeah, provided you're using the right browser and there's nothing within the div thats too wide.
Posted by Nick :: April 27th, 2004 at 03:02 AM
#10
Hey guys, to tell you the truth, I was pretty surprised we got the award. Maybe this will clear some things up.
The original design was using old table-based layouts. It wasn't until a few weeks before launch that we decided to go to an XHTML/CSS design. Naturally, migrating a pixel-perfect table-based layout to XHTML/CSS (with iframes, no less), posed some problems (the CSS actually breaks in IE5/PC at the moment). I tried getting the pages within the iframes to go XHTML/CSS, but had a lot of problems with widths being too large, etc. As far as the extra iframe attributes, some browsers wouldn't take out the padding within the iframes without setting the marginwidth properties.
The good news is, I just received a link for an iframe-like div/overflow setup that should make the width control problem a non-issue (as well as allow for more flexibility in future designs), and going from a float-positioned scheme to an absolute-positioned scheme. This should take care of some of the minor 1px bugs we're having in IE6/PC.
So, as a final note, we may have launched prematurely (in other words, we didn't go around to standards sites advertising our "compliance") and were pretty surpised when we got a Silver Star. But do look for future designs of the site (since we're a design site, we will have multiple designs up with a style switcher to tool around with). And many of the future designs will be very CSS-focused (e.g., flexible dimensions, various CSS tricks, etc). But thanks for the recognition, and thank you everyone for your notes (especially the CSS iframe note, I've been looking for that). Cheers, -M.
Posted by Michael :: April 27th, 2004 at 03:31 AM
#11
Come on, this is NOT a 'web standard'-site.
How do you guys from webstandardawards want to be taken seriously?
Posted by Peter Briers :: May 1st, 2004 at 04:58 PM
#12
Yeah umpire, Peter is right, this is not a web standards site. I demand a recount here, come on!
Posted by Powdah :: May 20th, 2004 at 06:19 AM
#13
26 faults = poor
Posted by ed :: June 10th, 2004 at 04:02 PM
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