Alvey :
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Are you ready for some DOCTYPEs!
2205 days ago
I read this review of the Kansas City Chiefs post-Zeldman redesign a while ago when it first came out, but I re-read it today to see all of the comments it got. The blogger slams the Chiefs for replacing a happy, valid, web standards design with one built on Flash and more nested tables than you could shake a blink tag at.
I revisited it because I mentioned the Chiefs' site the other day when summarizing the history of Blogsmith. I knew they were still using the same publishing system that Dave and I built, just with a new design that fits in more with the rest of the NFL and angering standardistas. The CMS was customizable enough to handle all kinds of designs -- valid or not.
My favorite gripe in there was this one:
The homepage uses RealPlayer for the video. Who uses Real anymore? When you don't have Real installed (does anybody?), you get a big image that says "you can't view Chiefs TV." Thanks, jackholes. (For added fun, when you roll over the Javascript dropdowns, the video stops working. Yay!)
Aw, you had me at "jackholes".
I'm pretty sure that all of the NFL video is in Real format, so the Chiefs had no choice in the matter.
In the comments, they quote a really defensive email from Lance, who runs the site. That's funny, since the Chiefs aren't known for defense. (Zing! I couldn't help myself.)
I know Lance and he's a pretty good guy. I know Jeffrey and he's one of the nicest guys I've ever worked with.
It's admirable that this blogger is giving the Chiefs grief for parting ways with Zeldman and for taking a giant step backwards in their standards support, but to be fair, the Chiefs won like 13 games in a row the year before they redesigned with Zeldman and then had a losing season after the switch.
I would have redesigned and ditched web standards myself. - New Member
- Existing Member
- Anonymous
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Brian Alvey 2203 days ago
That could definitely be. I think when we worked with the Chiefs nearly three years ago the NFL archives were all only available in Real video. Maybe more current team footage can be served as Flash.
Tony 2203 days ago
I'm pretty sure that the Redskins use Flash for all their video. They do use real to stream audio from press conferences, etc., but Redskins.com TV is all Flash as far as I can tell.