Yahoo! Calendar, the serious post
So, if you have a Yahoo! Mail account, you’ve noticed that the Yahoo! Mail site looks a little… different. You would have noticed that if you paid for a Yahoo! Plus account, you now have 2 gigs of space, while your free Yahoo! Mail has 100 megs now. And if you didn’t notice by now, you would have read it on CNET or in a multitude of websites talking about the storage space e-mail wars.
Oh yeah, you would also have noticed that the Yahoo! Mail, Calendar, Address Book and Notepad sites have been redesigned, but you won’t see that in many PR releases. That’s due to the awesome work of two of my awesome co-workers: Todd, who worked on the Mail application, and Maurcio, who worked on the Address Book. (I worked on the Calendar and, heh, Yahoo! Notepad.)
Some notes:
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The new code is a hybrid of CSS and <table> based design. The tabs in Calendar should look familiar to some developers out there. A lot of the modules are based in CSS, but the main layout uses a giant <table>. Why? Because we had four month turnaround deadline and we didn’t feel like sudden sobbing fits over a broken CSS layout in the middle of the night, that’s why.
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Obviously there are a lot of talks about web standards. There’s a lot of talk here about web standards here at Yahoo! too, but a lot of people think that only two types of sites exist - sites that have zero errors and warnings when put through an XHTML validator, and non-standard pages that involve 150 levels of tables. If you’re going to want to make sweeping changes on the way corporate web sites are coded, they’ll have to be done in baby steps.
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Web Developers, especially web developers at large companies, don’t work in a vacuum. Code that is out of the developers control is given to us from advertisers, other groups within Yahoo! (the large masthead with the Search button is an example) and if it doesn’t validate, well, too bad. You deal the best way you can. I think this is the reason I feel like hurling bricks through monitors whenever I see a weblogger announce a site that has just gone public and a bunch of college kids think they can be witty and clever by running their sites through a bunch of validation sites and leaving the results in a comment. “Ha ha,” they seem to mock. “My personal weblog is perfectly validated, with no warnings or errors! Therefore, I am better than you.”
To which I say, “Shut up, you have a LiveJournal.”
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So why even bother using creating modules using CSS instead of <table>, if we know it’s not going to validate? For the record, it’s because we can still take advantage of the benefits of CSS - fast initial load times, easy style switching (want to make the colors pink? Too easy!) and less code bloat.
(Off the record, it’s because I’ve practically forgotten how to create <table> based layouts. My bad.)
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