RE: FN-FORUM Another site check :)

date posted 3rd September 2002 12:41

> http://www.marshalls.co.uk

Sorry about the delay in responding to this. Having a bit of a busy
time.

> Any "constructive" comments appreciated .. I have some ideas
> myself about what I'd like to improve but fire away.

It's good to see a well stated privacy policy, but it doesn't give the
whole truth. You don't state that you're collecting screen width,
screen height, colour depth, referrer, url, font smoothing, browser and
a time related metric for each page impression.

A lot of the navigation text is very small and using px based font sizes
makes it very difficult for users of MSIE to adjust the size if they
need to.

I think Paul already mentioned the validation errrors - no doctype [1],
loads of errors even when forcing HTML 3.2, 4.01 transitional or XHTML
1.0 transitional [2], CSS errors and loads of warnings [3] and quite a
few accessibility problems [4].

Doesn't respond to http://marshalls.co.uk - might be a worthwhile change
to the DNS and virtual host settings.

Nice looking site to a non-designer. Just a shame it's all in tables
and not CSS [5] ;)

> For those that are interested it SQL backend, and XML/ XSLT
> for the presentation layer with VB and ASP as the marshalling
> layer .. Non techies can wake up now..

Did you think about writing the translation into an ISAPI filter or
similar? Or does the VB do something else? Just asking 'cos it's
something that I'm thinking about building in Java as a filter - look at
the user-agent and apply the relevant XSLT server side if it doesn't
support client side translation.

Darran.

[1] http://www.alistapart.com/stories/doctype/
[2]
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.marshalls.co.uk&charset=%28detect+
automatically%29&doctype=HTML+4.01+Transitional
[3]
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=www.marshalls.co.uk%2Fa
ssets%2Fstyles%2Fmain-style.css&warning=1&profile=css2
[4]
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/bobbyServlet?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.marsh
alls.co.uk&gl=wcag1-aaa
[5] http://www.alistapart.com/stories/tohell/