Chevrolet XHTML/CSS overhaul
Kudos to Chevrolet for their recent XHTML/CSS overhaul. The code is extremely clean, and they get extra brownie points for going for (and achieving) XHTML Strict compliance.
After France (who is always in the know) pointed me to the overhaul, I (naturally) went poking through their code and they are doing some sweet stuff. Much of it required by the strict standard not allowing things like “onclick” attributes in the code, they use the DOM to parse through all anchor tags on a page to create popup code, status bar messages, and more.
One thing I found weird is that they do the following at the top of each page:
if (!document.getElementById || !document.createTextNode) { window.location.replace('/upgrade/'); }
This is presumably to redirect older browsers to their upgrade page. While I can understand doing this from a standpoint of locking down your audience to your selected/supported browsers, part of the advantage of an XHTML design is that older browsers can view the site in is “degraded” form and still be able to get the information they are looking for just without the bells and whistles. This snippet of code basically eleminates that “feature” of an XHTML design, and locks those users out.
That minor confusion aside, this is a great looking rewrite of the site and whoever did the job (inside employees or vendor) are to be commended for their great job. They have been able to implement many things that we have pondered at Sprint (parsing in popup code onload, etc) and it will be intersting to see how things shake out for them over time and what others have to say about their implementation.
Edit:
After posting this I went poking around my own site and saw that Chris Moritz made a comment on my Sprint IFR article. Wonder if they were pondering using IFR for the Chevy redesign?? Oh, and got Chris’ name from a Digital Web mention of the redesign.
Edit 2:
From another mention (in portuguese) we meet antother developer (search for “thew”) who mentions yet another developer, Dave, who has a site. Hopefully Dave will put up some kind of a write-up on the launch.
We briefly looked at using IFR for the Chevy redesign, but we ultimately couldn’t ‘afford’ the file size hit. The biggest problem is having the font loaded into the SWF. A choice was devised: keep the beauty shots or use IFR; IFR lost out.
The browser upgrade code was an unfortunate necessity; the page has a huge marketing and branding component that could not be compromised for backwards compatibility.
First - it continues to boggle my mind that a person can post something on a site, and within 2 hours someone can find it. I’m not “trackbacked” on the articles I mentioned, and am far FAR from being anywhere close to a popular site. Just one of the wonders of the internet I guess.
Anyway… back to the subject at hand. I am curious that you say that IFR was determined to be too large of a file size hit. What specifically do you mean here? A per page “weight” issue? or number of files to load? The weight/number of files to load issue was one of our selling points for our executives, so am curious how you came to the opposite conclusion.
Per the redirect, I understand how corporate requirements sometimes dictate how a site is built. It is unfortunate that it had to be done, but your method is elegantly simple. A nice one-liner.
Just noticed how you are overlaying flash interavtive elements over your “beauty shots”. This is something we have also pitched, and you provide a wonderful working example of how the space can be used and reused. Again… excellent job.
Thanks! The Flash overlay is pretty cool; but look for even cooler uses of that space in the future. Our major task for this redesign was laying down a hardocore coding and information architecture groundwork. With this in place we can tailor our efforts instead of rebuilding the whole site for each new model year.
The page weight issue came down to the home page. Loading that extra SWF on the home page is too costly (we’re dangerously close to 100K as it is). Of course, the SWF would cache, but it’s the initial load that gets us. I’m sure we’ll revisit the technique in other contexts (mini-sites, temporary promotions, etc.) It certainly solves a very real need we have in terms of image/header management.
We’re quite happy to join the ranks of major sites with web standards-based sites. We appreciate your efforts with Sprint and the great work at ESPN, Wired, and all the others.
There’s still a lot of work for us to do, which will be live in the coming months (some sections need to be reworked to get rid of some legacy coding techniques).
We’re quite pleased to see all the good will coming out of the web development community for all the long hours put in creating this redesign/rebuild.
Hi Aaron,
I was trying to keep a low profile over at the portuguese site. I’m amazed too. As for Chris finding things, he’s all about NetNewsWire, wish I had the time to stay up to date with mine. Anyway, I wanted to thank you for your comments about the Chevrolet site. I really appreciate your comments. I had a lot of fun with the DOM scripting and I’m glad someone noticed all my hard work. I can’t stand event handlers in the mark-up, and I’m not all that crazy about class attributes either, but I’ll give a little on that one.
Thanks again,
Matt Dertinger