The Times stuck in the past?

The Times need to get with the times.

Considering the profile of The Times, this is probably the worst website design and development I have witnessed in a long long time. I had to check the date to see if it wasn’t April 1st.

Please sir, can I have some more?

The new site suffers from a life threatening case of Divitis. I never thought something could be this bad. Some places in the HTML source have elements nested 10 deep.

<div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div>

What a joke.

Who needs navigation?

The main menu tabs (“News”, “Opinion”, “Business” etc) are images with text embedded. Didn’t we stop doing this years ago? Not just any images, these are nice and juicy GIF flavour images. Normally text-in-image blurs and pixellates horrendously when the user zooms. Those crafty people at The Times have cut to the chase and rendered that text blurry as hell at normal size.

They chosen a delicate serif that various stroke width to the extremes and therefore cannot even be rendered at that size.

I smell design by committee.

 There are 18 CSS files just to style the home page. EIGHTEEN. There are four separate CSS files for IE, IE6, IE7 and IE8. Internet Explorer is not that bad.

There are 25 JavaScript files, from 4 different servers.

Give me some structure

The design seems to be based on some sort of “grid”. While a grid is a very legitimate way to design a website, you’re not suppose to use a newspaper grid. You’re not limited to physical space, you don’t need to cram four words to a line.

And look at that line-height, or leading as we’re dealing with a “newspaper”. The main articles headlines are sitting with rivers of whitespace between them, while within the main copy lines are squeezed together. The subtitle and date are crashing into one another. It’s a typographic train wreck.

For the default font choice tto-fonts.css (because you need a separate stylesheet for fonts) tells us that The Times website prefers Georgia over Times New Roman (or Times on a Mac).

body{font:62.5% Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;; color:#000}

CSS sniffing connoisseurs will note the double semi-colon The Times uses at the end of the font stack – that’s to hold in the sheer weight of the irony preceding it.

Doctype Decoration

Doctype Decoration is my phrase of the month. The Times proudly boasts XHTML. The W3C Validator politely informs us of “82 Errors, 29 warning(s)” (emphasis mine).

And they expect us to pay for this shit?