Monthly Archive for September, 2007

MindShare launch

Published by Doug Winter on September 19, 2007 in News. 1 Comment

I am very, very, pleased to reveal in all it’s glory a site that we’ve been working on now for some considerable time: MindShare. It’s a huge site for a very large (and very lovely) customer.

The design is courtesy of Rob Dennis, and our own Francois Jordaan did the extremely spiffy Information Architecture. I hope you will agree that the results speak for themselves – I think it’s the best website I’ve contributed to in many years.

The technology is particularly interesting, using Twisted, lxml and Oracle’s dbxml to produce a new and quite radically different CMS technology. The architecture layer for delivering pages uses XPROC, XQuery and XSL to do as much of the heavy lifting as possible. There are a lot of exciting possibilities with these technologies, and we’ll be releasing some very interesting components based on some of them as soon as we can.

Oh, and it’s driving the sister MindShare Interaction site too – and we’ll be launching sites for MindShare in German, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian over the coming months, all running from the same content repository.
So huge props to the everyone who has worked on the site, both within and outside Isotoma ,and many thanks to the Twisted guys for their consistently excellent code, to Stefan Behnel for lxml and to Oracle for releasing dbxml under an Open Source license.

Watch this space for more interesting uses of the XML stack in the comings months.

Blue Latitude goes live

Published by Andy Theyers on September 19, 2007 in News. Closed

Another customer site went live today – old friends of Isotoma Blue Latitude asked us to help them build their new site. Once again it’s based on Plone, with design by Rob Dennis of Red Red Robot. We’re really happy with the way it looks, even if all that transparency was a bit of a bugger in IE6.

http://www.bluelatitude.net/

CSS tip: beware Helvetica

Published by Francois Jordaan on September 3, 2007 in XHTML/CSS. 2 Comments

It’s a fairly common practice to specify a site’s primary font as { font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; } That way, people with Helvetica installed (primarily Mac users) get the real thing you intend instead of Microsoft’s half-baked rip-off. Other people get Arial, and are none the wiser.

However, I got burned recently by some unintended side effects. Basically, Helvetica on the Mac has a much smaller line-height than Arial (which is identical cross-platform). On 11px sized text, the difference is 2px, more for larger text. This has ugly consequences wherever pixel amounts matter, which is most places except body text, for example navigation menus or when you’re trying to vertically align an icon with a text label.

Even worse, it’s impossible to work around without JavaScript-based platform detection. Since I draw the line at that, I have dumped Helvetica in most cases except headline sizes. To this typographical purist at least, the differences are invisible under ~18px.