I have a couple things I’d like to say. I’ll put them in a definition list, because it’s my HTML Element Of The Day*.
- Royal Northern College of Music relaunches websites – with standards!
- The Royal Northern College of Music has recently relaunched its website, and I took a quick look expecting to see the worst. I have a special interest in this particular site as firstly my dad works there, and secondly my ex-company went for the contract to do the site a few years ago. We didn’t get it, but I still think my design is better.
- Ho hum. So I expected to see tables-galore, a feast of spacer GIFs and all manner of other nasties. Instead I find validation, sIFR and the Joomla content management system. Not quite perfect (then again, what is?) but lovely all the same. But my design is still better.
- Horizontal inline stacking bar charts
- OK, so the name might not be all that snappy, but I quite like my little idea for a sparkline-esque chart. I won’t bother explaining it too much, it’s just a collection of images in a line that have their total widths adding up to 100 pixels (or whatever you want to use) and the width of each individual image as the percentage of that value in the chart.
Here’s an example for a voting system. Users can vote good (green), average (orange) and bad (red). In this chart you can easily see that the good and bad votes are roughly equal, and the average votes are less. Easy, yes? It needs a bit of working on, but I’m fairly pleased with it.
* This probably won’t happen again, so in reality the definition list is my Only Ever HTML Element Of The Day. You get what you pay for.
