New BBC News Homepage!! is...yikes
April 1 2008, 10:59am
Looks nice. Clean. However, it fails validation with an impressive 378 errors. Maybe they should have got me to do the job ;)
I understand the difficulties when working with legacy code though. It’s also tricky when dealing with content-based websites where the person who builds the app has little control over what the editorial team is actually pumping into the site after launch - for all we know this could have been the most perfect XHTML until content producers started sticking code into their stories. But I doubt that is the case. I think it’s just been built badly. Also, if you remove their stylesheet you’ll notice that the layout still depends on tables. Tsk tsk.
But this is the BB-freaking-C! Do they really have an excuse? There’s probably a large team of people working on this homepage revamp (it’s only 1 level deep - the rest of the site is as before). On Japan Today there was just lil old me doing the design, XHTML templates and building the controllers, models etc necessary to display everything, with some expert backup from two IT team members at the client, who helped with hardware and optimising my queries etc.
For a company like the BBC who are usually quite progressive and seem to have admirable policies towards accessibility and the like, to have a page with that level of validation failure is pretty disappointing. Either the agency who handled it (or the in-house team) doesn’t give a shite about web standards, doesn’t know about them, or they just did a piss-poor job with their QA.
Word on the grapevine is that the Japan Times is looking to revamp their website next. It will be interesting to see whether they do a BBC-style job (probably with a well-connected agency who has experience working with big clients but no real history of producing standards-based web products, or a well-meaning in-house team who just aren’t experienced enough) or find a younger team or individual (COUGH) who can actually do a thorough job at probably the fraction of the cost.
Rant over.
