Left Lane
Life, web, and caffeine. By Pat Collins.
ESPN.com Looking a Bit Pixelated
Published February 9th, 2006ESPN.com is making some subtle changes that are making even the most laid-back of the web geek/sports fan crowd sit up and take notice.
It seems the Connecticut-based sports media giant has been phasing out the use of a technique similar to sIFR to replace headlines on its web site using Flash elements. First, it happened in individual articles. Now it’s happening on the front page. Huh?
Wait a minute. You would think that if there is a place where you want to: (1) catch a user’s attention and keep it, (2) show off your company’s web team without sacrificing accessibility, (3) boast your technological prowess to potential investors; that place would be the front page, right?
Exactly. I’m convinced that ESPN realized that their front page was loading so slowly that it was causing many potential viewers to run for the hills — or SportsIllustrated.com. Who wants to wait for a half dozen extra flash elements to load, just to see some pretty text? Curiously, even the Flash elements they do have on the front page, as of this writing, feature text that is not anti-aliased. This is an artistic decision that is clearly going against all forward-thinking web typography decisions being made today. Does ESPN know something I don’t?
Update: Mike Davidson was kind enough to correct me on my faux pas by calling the technology that ESPN used sIFR. In my mind it all got lumped together, so my editorial apologies. I’ve changed the title to better reflect where I am coming from.
Posted in Design, Entertainment, Web, Sports.
Ummm, ESPN.com never used sIFR. And the front page is over a megabyte and much heavier on the Flash than it’s ever been.
Nice Super Bowl by the way… how Pittsburgh can live with itself after that one, I’ll never know. You should donate the trophy to the National Center for the Blind.
Maybe not a released version of sIFR, but an early, obtrusive form of it. Consider “this.”:http://www.holovaty.com/blog/archive/2003/10/18/2320 I see you chimed in there. No wonder the front page is over 1 MB if they consider “this image”:http://espn.go.com/media/pg2/2006/0209/photo/caple_134.jpg an efficient use of 36 KB. (!)
The Super Bowl was ugly. Nonetheless we made the plays when it counted. I would wear my earplugs if I were you — the whining coming from the Latte City is unbearable.
It was actually not sIFR at all, and even pre-dated Inman’s IFR by at least two years. It was basically inline Flash files with text… that’s all. And yes, the page is huge and so are all of those images.
As for the Super Bowl, I really don’t have to bitch because the rest of the world, save the state of Pennsylvania, is doing it for me. No football fan in their right mind believes that win was deserved. Even Skip Bayless from ESPN — the world’s most vocal Seahawk hater — says Seattle was robbed. This was an un-loseable game for you guys. You had the entire officiating crew in your back pockets and you still only managed to win the game by a single phantom holding call. That was a 14 point call, and we haven’t even brought up the other 6 officiating atrocities.
Oh well, at least it’s the Steelers — a blue-collar team that’s hard not to like. If it were the Cowboys, I’d be in treatment right now.
Nonetheless you make good points about the site and I’ve corrected the story accordingly. Thanks, Mike.
The legacy of champions is their ability to overcome trials and tribulations. How did the Seahawks do that? Miss field goals? Drop passes? Throw interceptions at key points in the game? It was a sloppy game all around and I admit that, but I didn’t see them do anything extraordinary to rise above their troubles (even outside ones created by the officials) to get that trophy. Sorry!
Can’t we all just get along? Group hug!