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

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.

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.

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.