I like the way this is going...a lot. My biggest gripe is a need to scroll horizontally to read the content. That part needs to fit inside 800px width with a font around either 120% or 150%. Then the left and right columns typically used for site navigation as well as ads and other ancillary content can be examined when needed. And this even works outside the common 3-column layout design. Meaning a site can have multi-columns for content but hopefully this more newspaper style layout is going to fade from use as computer displays simply are not geared to reading in columns when those columns extend below "the fold" so to speak...

And to make this work sites will absolutely have to make use of properly implements CSS and server side processing based on MIME type and other header info that a browser sends along with the request. It all does add a layer of complexity that many site owners will view as not significant enough to design with these requirements in mind. Sort of like how many sites feel that leaving Mac users to fend for themselves makes sense from a business standpoint because the overhead to design and support what might amount to less that 2-3% of visitors to their particular site is not cost effective.

Still if site owners and developers would focus more on common sense and standards then trying to be too cute and tricky in their coding, internet use would be a far more pleasant thing...

I for one really dislike Flash for easily over 90% of the sites I might visit. A few need it and use it well, but most simply gobble my bandwidth with some pointless intro page that eventually just offers a link into the site...or they use it to push video ads that most users don't know how to block because the are not willing to disable Flash until they visit a site where it matters.

Anyway, this looks super promising and I do love the concept of a NIT site design standards. Especially for sites geared toward NIT's and smaller mobile devices. I mean geeze, if you have a site targeted toward a specific hardware platform, it's not unreasonable to expect that it function correctly on that platform? Yes? No?

BTW, for the most part this site is fine until I am need to increase the magnification on the site to 150%.

You know a lot of this goes away if the browser itself allowed font resizing. Page magnification is not the same thing. Font resizing changes only the font size whereas the magnification explodes the whole page. If the site is setup correctly it will elegantly manage re-sized fonts on the user end and re-flow with a changed in font size w/o affecting layout beyond making the page longer or shorter depending on the direction a font is re-sized. Or does the OS2008 offer a way to alter font size and I just have missed it?

Most users have no idea what CSS is, or that it even exists. They shouldn't have to know. That's the job of the web designer. I do agree that most sites have no obligation to be tablet-friendly, but sites that claim to be tablet-specific certainly do. I also agree about the #*&%$ flash. I just disable it on my machines, and don't deal with it. It's the most worthless crap ever invented. It can be useful for a few specific applications, but indiscriminate use of flash just because it's flashy really turns me off. In almost any kind of design, simple is better. I don't visit forums to look at pictures, moving or not, and I prefer there aren't any, other than what might be posted to make things clearer in a thread. But that's just me, and maybe it's a character flaw. If so, I'll just keep on being flawed.

interesting you mention moving images on a page. Actually there have been studies after studies that show animated ads, ,logo, what not all will actually distract users and they spend less time on pages with any sort of animation that is not germane to the intent of the site.

But, yup, in my mind Flash is a great tool...but it needs to be used with restraint. And I think designers need to rethink their user of it as we move to more and more mobile computing.

same goes for those sites with embeded video that loads whether you want it to or not.

btw, if ya wanna look at over engineered pages take a look at the soruce on pages over at eBay....some of them load over 200k of SCRIPTS....I mean gimme a break!

You're certainly right about ebay, breck, and same goes for amazon... as well as many news sites.

Personally I prefer a drill-down approach over those "let's throw everything we can at the user on one page" tactics. It's cleaner, more functional, and faster. The tablets have exposed the ugliness of many sites-- being required to wait for 200+ objects of any kind to load before the web page fully renders is just flat insane.

I'd wager that 90% of what's shoved on us via main web pages is immaterial to what we're looking for. It's definitely more distracting than useful.

I really regret not having the time to put into jablet.net like I'd wanted, but I'm not giving up completely. It may be Summer before I get back to it (when I don't have to spend every single night coaxing 2 boys through mounds of homework) but I intend to. Jabber was just one aspect of the site; I mean for it to be a general tablet resource as well. The tablet-friendly standards thing just popped into my head today thanks to this thread and I really want to get to work on it!

Just came up with 2 more criteria to add to certification levels:

-finger-friendliness

-home page load speed

D'oh! How could I have forgotten those???

Yes! Sometimes the thanks is so huge it fills up the
whole screen.

Good news (I didn't know where else to put this): MICROSOFT HAS GIVEN IN TO INTERNET STANDARDS!

That's right, they officially announced that IE8 will reverse years of proprietary terror (and its own original intent) by defaulting to OPEN web standards.

Imagine fully-functional css across the internet. No more custom-coding for Microsoft's insanity.

Oh, the joy.

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/blog...aspx?blog=1985

(This post is also a reminder to myself that I promised to get back on the stick this summer with jablet.net...)