You should really head on over to Mezzoblue, where Dave Shea and Mike Davidson team up and bag on my sIFR implementation. I mean, what do those guys know, anyway? :)
Seriously, they make good points about my site, and it’s a nice discussion of the pros and cons of the sIFR technique. Check it out.
001 // Dustin // 10.26.2004 // 1:15 PM
Take it with a grain of salt. :)
002 // Brian Ford // 10.26.2004 // 1:29 PM
Well, at the very least, at least the critique has merit. I think the “effects” of the implementation is really what they’re critiquing anyway. I mean, it works, and it looks great but your site -does- load really slow. I just assumed it was our server being gitchy, but there is a lot of noticeable lag everytime I visit your site, or link to another section of your site, and I guess now I know why.
003 // Jeff Croft // 10.26.2004 // 1:36 PM
To be perfectly clear, I wasn’t at all offended by their comments, and they certainly do have merit. I was just joking around with the “team up to bag on my site” bit.
As I said on Dave’s page, I think I’ve gone overboard with the sIFR. It’s a great technique, but it is best in moderation and I think I’ve gone past that point. I’ll probably scale it back in my next redesign (which I’m hoping comes sooner, rather than later, but I have a number of other projects on my plate I have to get to first).
004 // Mike D. // 10.26.2004 // 1:59 PM
For the record, I love this site (and Jeff knows this) and the only reason I even mentioned the slowness was because Dave implied that it might have been sIFR related. My only point was that I noticed the slowness long before sIFR was implemented. Jeff changed servers a few weeks ago and that seems to have helped things.
005 // Brian Ford // 10.26.2004 // 2:28 PM
Jeff got a new server? When did this happen??! Heheh. Your comment sections always seem to be rife with misunderstandings.
I think I’m going to, in the future, preface my posts with the fact that we’re related and also working together outside of our normal jobs.
I was really just saying “aha! so that’s why the site is running slow, what a relief that it’s NOT because our new server isn’t running as fast as I would have hoped.”
I really like this site too, and one thing that CSS seems to do is make it too easy for someone to change an already great design. I know that this is supposed to be one of the selling points of CSS, but I see it leading to a lack of long-term consistency, design-wise, if a person is constantly redesgning just because he or she can. But I also know that a personal site, like a car or any other belonging, gets boring pretty quickly if you see it every day. Lets just hope the trend doesn’t spill over into corporate design, where consistency is key to building a loyal client-base.
This is part of the reason that my site… hahah i know… when I get it done… will probably end up sparse on the design tip. Perhaps this wil force me to focus on the content. (And free Jeff up from having to help me out too much with the Standards ;)
006 // Jeff Croft // 10.26.2004 // 3:36 PM
Brian-
I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that CSS makes it easy to redesign a site. The fact that a well-structred CSS/XHTML site will have it’s content seperated from it’s presentation makes it easier, but redesigning will always be a major undertaking. You’re talking about rethinking a site architechture, creating new images, etc, etc. It’s a lot of work either way.
What CSS really helps with is those little changes that we always ned up having to make. For example, say we build a site the “old fashioned” way and use HTML to specifiy ‘font size=2”. We do this throughout the entire site, so that little bit of code exists in probably 500 places by the time we’re done. Updating each and every one is real nightmare, and we’re bound to miss one or two along the way. With CSS, we can specifiy in one place that, say, “font-size: 10px” for every paragraph in the site. This way, when the client moans that 10px is too darn small for his/her tired eyes, we can go to one place, change the “10” to a “12” and be done with it.
That sort of thing is where CSS really shines.
007 // tom // 10.27.2004 // 6:23 AM
not up to date on this sIFR thing, just off to do more research, but in opera 7.23 with flash player 7 i don’t see any of your headers, just grey lines. Had to look in IE to see what i was missing…
008 // Jeff Croft // 10.27.2004 // 6:44 AM
The technique is purported to be Opera compatible, I believe. I’m not on the latest version of sIFR yet, and there’s a possibly I’ve done something wrong in my implementation. I am pretty sure it’s supposed to work with Opera.