Chris Bowles asked me what I thought about the new design for the University’s home page, and I decided to post my thoughts here.

If you want to get technical, it does a pretty good job on the XKCD test—the only thing I couldn’t find relatively easily was the University police phone number. But it clearly follows the letter rather than the spirit of that cartoon: the big, eye-catching stuff is still about “branding” rather than helping the visitor find what they’re looking for. I’m not saying branding isn’t important, but I’m sure for the vast majority of the people coming to the web site it just gets in their way.

Also, I thought I’d mention that the layout is a bit broken when I view the page in Safari (the browser I use most.) I think this is because I’ve set the preferences to “never use font sizes smaller than 12.” Why do page designers love small fonts so much?

James Clark: XML vs the Web.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion:

So what’s the way forward? I think the Web community has spoken, and it’s clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. XML isn’t going away but I see it being less and less a Web technology; it won’t be something that you send over the wire on the public Web, but just one of many technologies that are used on the server to manage and generate what you do send over the wire.

My take on XML is that Microsoft and IBM and Software AG and all the other big software vendors took a technology that was originally a simplification of something that had grown over complicated (SGML) and saddled it with layer upon layer of complexity, because then they could sell tools to manage that complexity. In the meantime, people that needed to get stuff done and didn’t have huge budgets for tools moved on to less complicated technologies.

[update] I should probably add that XML is still very useful and won’t go away any time soon, and I don’t regret the effort I’ve put into learning XML technologies. But there’s a lot of junk built on XML—SOAP, UDDI, WS-*, etc.—that could (and should) die unmourned.