Some CMS systems are better than others at delivering standards-compliant work intact. As vendors, we can recommend but not dictate which back-end systems our clients use when they do their own back-end work.

Sometimes, because of legacy or e-commerce issues of one sort or another, a client needs to work with a system whose output is less than ideal from a standards point of view.

Then, too, without referring to specific cases, sometimes clients change the work between delivery and launch.

Sometimes the work comes out exactly the way you delivered it, and sometimes not. If the site is good anyway, and if you’re proud of the work you did, it’s okay to showcase the site, even if some details differ from what you delivered.

Of 643 validation errors, most of them are because the body tag opens before the head tag closes. Clean that up and I suspect the site will validate rather quickly. I’ve seen this same error before with .NET (oddly, I never see this with PHP for some strange reason), so this might not be Happy Cog’s fault at all.

Also, I’ve seen designs — to be implemented by the client or a third party — sail off to the client, complete with the most elegant CSS and a perfect XHTML breakout, only to have the client re-code the site into HTML4 Loose (or worse!) with borked table-based layout, font tags, and the lamest CSS ever written, because that was the level of Web code that they understood.

It’s sad, but it happens — and I feel your frustration.

@Robert: resolution depends, IMHO, on your traffic stats. No reason to use 760 if you’ve had only a declining handful of visitors using 800×600.

Back in the real world, try finding the same item on Book-a-Million and Amazon, then disable all styles and JavaScript. It’s plain that a lot of effort was made to ensure that the site worked for the widest audience possible.

It’d be useful to read a little about the compromises that were made in order to get to the finish line, and also about the reasoning behind those compromises.

FWIW, my source-browsing 2c: double close tags for body and html at the end of the movie detail pages.

Could I suggest that Lucida Sans Unicode might be mentioned in the CSS, as well as Lucida Grande

Nice. I do that here, BTW, to correct for the lack of italics in Lucida Grande:

em, cite { font-family: "Lucida Sans", "Trebuchet MS", "Bitstream Vera Sans", Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; }

Could I suggest that Lucida Sans Unicode might be mentioned in the CSS, as well as Lucida Grande, since it is an extremely similar font, but comes with Windows machines?

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a well-designed site. I’m completely unconcerned about the odd table thrown in here or there. You should see what my XHTML/CSS looks like after it’s been sent through the ASP.NET wringer.

Then again, no, you shouldn’t see it.

Congrats to the folks at Happy Cog. Nice job.

Maybe this is why.
Total HTTP Requests: 60
Total Size: 944849 bytes

Scriptaculous? Prototype? You’ve gotta be kidding me! jQuery stomps the colon of this wanna-be competitor. I’ll prove it, too. This stuff runs on the user’s machine (responsibility required).

I’m not gonna fuss about the markup, I’m sure the majority of this garbage comes from the server-side code that you do not have control over.

Ordered lists have a huge left margin in IE.

The mouse-over animations are disorienting. Stick to the click.

Other than that, bravo!

The most upsetting thing is that the body tag opens before the close head tag (especially when the correctly placed body tag is sitting right there commented out). The random table used for not-tabulated data but for Flash content (using embed instead of object, no less) is a little weird, and a definition list that has divs as direct children is a little weirder.

Ignoring the markup, the site looks great. I’m curious about the statistics used when a fixed-width 1024 wide site was chosen. I am under the impression 800 wide screens are still very pervasive. Given the right setup, it’s a very pleasing site, though. I’ll be happy to use it next time I’m book shopping online.

Crushing on the pretty transitions in those sidebar sections. Yum.

The ‘edit wishlist’ button retains the outline, but with it extending over the entire functional navigation bar I would question whether the average keyboard user would gain any usability from it.

I like the clean lines of the design and the functionality is great – with the exception of the flash ‘more of’ area – really frustrating trying to read the hover info.

cheers

Kim