The BBC has slowly been revamping its websites and as of yesterday morning it was the turn of the news.
I would have expected for them to have made the site better, and indeed they have given me my number one wish, the site is now much wider with bigger text and no longer hugs the left-hand side in a narrow strip. However all the other improvements are skin deep.
Looking under the hood, I was quite surprised to see markup that would have made a developer from last century proud. The whole site is table based, not just the outer structure but the whole thing. Add to that spacer images, inline styling with depreciated attributes and a whole load of other ancient tricks which really really really belong to days past and the result is a complete mess. Not to mention the overcomplicated and unnecessary JavaScript.
Turning off the stylesheet results in a page that is all over the place. I’m glad they kept there ‘Low graphics version’ as it is absolutely necessary but one set of well constructed HTML should suffice. Also, the low graphics version has a stylesheet that is just not necessary at all, turning it off does little so why bother?
Perhaps it is too much to expect them to reach a content first div/CSS based layout in one fell swoop on such a complex site, but I have managed to do exactly that to one with far more variable content and over 40,000 pages. It took me 2 months of preparation and a 24 hour switchover period and I did it virtually single-handed.
I think this BBC news site redesign is a complete disaster. Sort out your CMS first!
