4 Cartier, Harry Winston, Tiffany, & Safety

Cartier

http://www.cartier.com/

The bad: Clearly from get go the automatic audio(1) and video flash(2) intro is a nightmare for slow computers, but at the same time if they’re selling such high priced jewelry for example a $32,000 bracelet they probably don’t care about poor people with a 10 year old computer lol! The animated navigation(3) is so fancy it’s almost useless because you can get lost easily.

The good: Through the navigation is too complex, it’s a double edged sword; the perk is that the whole Cartier website’s index(1) is on one page, and it appears that you stay on one page the whole time you browse their products. Some would argue that all that flash animation that kills the load time makes the site looks pretty(2), (the age old controversy of flash vs. html), I would disagree and call far too unnecessary for the tradeoff.  The overall fancy look of the website probably makes their customers feel rich(3).

Harry Winston

http://www.harrywinston.com/

The bad: The first time your computer goes to the site it takes a while to load(1) and seems slows down computer initially, and I don’t see a lot animations and graphics that would account for bad load times - long story short, if you going to hurt the load time better be a good reason for it. Just like Tiffany’s (below), the overall appearance of the website is boring, too plain because there’s too much white(2). Again on the plain-Jane appearance, Harry Winston doesn’t have any animations or dynamic pictures that I can see of, and some of the product pictures have a black background which looks crappy on the white page background. Another web design error is the lack of submenus or rather lack of explanation(3), for example “The Incredible” section, you have to click the link to get any sense of idea of what it’s about.

The good: Though the links needs to be labeled better the site’s overall navigation is good, you don’t have to look for links(1). Refreshing, instead of using buttons like most traditional eCommerce sites Harry Winston just uses links throughout the checkout process(2) to look cleaner. The good news about being too plain is that the site is not too cluttered(3) like its competitor Cartier.

Tiffany

http://www.tiffany.com/

The bad: Overall Tiffany’s site seems bland(1), it needs more sparkle considering what they’re selling, especially the home page(2). They forgot the readers when they decided the color scheme, the contrast between the text and background isn’t enough(3), it just hurts the eyes, especially the white text and blue background.

The good: I do very much like the way they show their product details, most eCommerce sites have a grid of their products with details of the products underneath the pictures. If there’s a lot of products on one page customers might get confused of which is which. The way Tiffany’s has the mouse over detail pop up there’s no confusion as well as it saves space and the zoom on mouse over is a nice touch(1). The only thing they could’ve improved upon with that feature is if the users could see a slide show of different angles of the product on mouse over. With the topics across the top, dropdown hover over submenus, and mouse over font color highlight(2) their website’s navigation overall is easy to use and clean looking(3).

It's beginning to bother me a lot that our assignments involve having a picture of ourselves, email address, and first and last name, and describe ourselves paragraph were anyone can see it - that doesn't seem safe at all. I've been stalked before, and it was really scary, it doesn't take much information for someone to find more information to stalk you. How do you feel, classmates, about this?

(all images are screenshots)

3 XML vs. HTML

Xml stands for EXtensible Markup Language and Html stands for hypertext markup language, meaning they’re both markup languages they look and are very similar but not the same. In short, the purpose of html is to display data, Html is really only for the web, while xml sends and stores data.

Xml tags are case sensitive, must have an end tag (while some html tags don’t have an end tag and some html end tags are no longer needed when you get into html5), must be nested in order, some characters must be written differently, and attributes in tags must be in quotes unlike html. Which sucks, because that makes it easier to have one character wrong or nested incorrectly the whole thing not work and harder to find the error in the code with xml, because of newer versions of html like html4 and html5 html is more forgiving than xml. The upside is that unlike html, that has predefined tags aka you can’t use anything but those tags, xml you make up your own tags; and xml saves all the spaces you typed when html just gets rid of white space, I mean how many times have you had to figure out the code for an indent with html but with xml you can just indent like you normally would!

Examples:

Nesting…

Correct <b><i>text</i></b> ok for html and xml

Incorrect <b><i>text</b></i> not ok for xml but like will still work in html

Html tags that don’t have an end tag…

<br><img><meta> <hr> (for more examples see http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/qt/html-void-elements.htm)

Some end tags are no longer needed when you get into html4 and html5 (explained here http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/qt/optional-html-end-tags-when-to-include-them.htm)

Correct <p> text</p>        will work for xml and html

Incorrect <p>text               will never work in xml but you can get away with it with html

Attributes in tags must be quoted…

Correct <body color=“navy”>content</body> ok for both html and xml

Incorrect <body color=navy>content</body> again will work with html but not at all with xml

Case sensitivity…

Correct <title>the title text</title> ok for both xml and html

Incorrect <Title>the title text</title> will work in html but not xml

Odd characters like > < ^ & “”   ‘’ must be written differently…

Use &amp; for & and &quot; for “

The truth is that you’re supposed to write odd characters like this for html but html will let you get away with these. With xml you must use the code for these kinds of characters, not type it out like a word document.

For more examples and more info about xml see http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_syntax.asp

All RSS (really simple syndication) feeds are (a type of standard way of writing)  xml, for those of you guys that don’t know or don’t use RSS feeds, RSS is like a special bookmark instead a bookmark you would save on your browser to link to a favorite website. RSS feeds are like news feeds or rather updates feed of that website so for example: if a new webpage is added to the website the RSS feed would show that update and link you to the new page - Or link you to whatever the update might be like a new story (a lot of newspaper websites have RSS feeds) or new song all in a short drop down list with most recent update up top.

  (screen shots of the bottom right of homepages of http://www.msnbc.msn.com/     News and http://www.foxnews.com/)


(Despite flash and php) Still nothing can replace html for making websites, xml just complements html. Xml was created with the idea in mind of the conundrum of “how to we send this info from a website into our database (or other application) easily when they’re incompatible?” The answer, xml stores data in plain text format that reads as if you’re reading a word document (a more accurate description would be reading .txt file in notepad but with an .xml file extension instead) and since almost all programs can read text documents it’s much easier for other programs to translate and transfer the data into them. One of the most annoying problems with technology is that it keeps changing which means updating to the new, and updating is a pain with all the incompatible software and hardware and converting data, since xml comes out reading like text this is no problem.

Xml isn’t just data sent from a website to an application xml sends data to reading\voice machines for the disabled like a computer that reads out loud text that’s on their screen on your website.