When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · November
· · · · 24 (2 entries)
People Are Not Design Elements · David Weinberger pointed to BlogExplosion, which seems like a decent enough idea, but it’s clearly not for me because, based on the site’s front page, it is designed for use by people in sunny climates who have lots of hair. In fact, now that the industry has moved past time-wasting Flashturbation intros, my number-one gripe about corporate web sites is the use of anonymous bright shiny happy people (carefully balanced as to race and gender) as design elements. This entry was going to be a snarl about the clueless big corporations who do this, so I thought I’d start my excoriation with the Fortune 500, but of the first fifteen, not one is clearly guilty. Lots of them have pictures of people, but they are clearly either employees (even, as with IBM, identified by name) or customers, depicted as such. Most of the sites seem to be pretty no-nonsense, some even reasonably lightweight, designed to get you where you’re going. Some even manage to be nice-looking, too. The world got a bit more clueful while I wasn’t paying attention; neat.
More Relax · I often caution people against relying too heavily on schema validation. “After all,” I say, “there is lots of obvious run-time checking that schemas can’t do, for example, verifying a part number.” It turns out I was wrong; with a little extra work, you can wire in part-number validation—or pretty well anything else—to RelaxNG. Elliotte Rusty Harold explains how. Further evidence, if any were required, that RelaxNG is the world’s best schema language, and that anyone who who’s using XML but not RelaxNG should be nervous.
