browsers

Testing Newsflash

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

2007-08-23: site updated to Newsflash 0.12 : the Helvetica selector is gone, which means some of the content of this post no longer applies.

newsflash screendump in Opera, Firefox and MSIEI've just given this blog a facelist using the Roople NewsFlash theme, and I'm somehow dubitative about it:

  • on the plus side
    • the 3 "user" blocks above content and the 3 other ones below content are a neat feature
    • the color balance feels good to me, in either of the 3 predefined colors
    • overall, it works way better than my "nested" theme a few months ago
  • on the minus side
    • although I tried various content layouts using the 3 user blocks, I couldn't get anything fit properly in them: it seems these will be specifically useful when a site has snippets of equivalent size to fill in them. This could probably be news (the theme isn't called Newsflash for nothing) or ads
    • on my screen at least, the text appears blurry, especially in Firefox
    • generally speaking, it seems bold font is used too much, with essentially the same character sizes for title, tags, and various links. I think some more gradation in font effects would be welcome
    • the site slogan is incorrectly positioned in MSIE
    • in Opera and Firefox, the site slogan ascenders collides with the site name descenders
    • the logo display code is wrong (relative URLs); I had to tweak it in page.tpl.php to accomodate the site folder structure
    • the logo setting doesn't apply properly

Browser market shares, revisited

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

A few days ago, the designer working on our sites asked me stats about the browsers visiting the sites. She already had the general data available, but this time what she wanted was the info about the "other" browsers.

Which is quite true: once a site has been designed to standards and the quirks of the two or three major choices, work has to be spent on the non-standard non-mainstream ones. But to what extent ? Here are the data.