posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 2:30 PM
by
swarren
Adventures in CSS: Windows Marketplace 2006
Often when you make the "sequel" to an existing application, several of the requirements boil down to fixing what didn't work well in V1. For the original Windows Marketplace, one of the largest pain points was the lack of editorial control over just about everything: layout, style, content -- pretty much anything needed to keep the site fresh and compelling.
So it's no surprise that one of the key requirements for the latest version of Windows Marketplace was lots of editorial control over just those things: layout, style, content, navigation, A/B testing, tracking, and all the other knobs the editorial staff needs to turn. We made the call (some might say the leap of faith) to rely on CSS positioning for the core elements of the site, as well as CSS styles for much of the behavior of the site. The content management system would emit only semantic markup; CSS would do the rest.
We had to learn quite a few CSS tricks to pull this off, but in the end using CSS has satisfied the editorial flexibility requirement with flying colors.
Home page with CSS:
Same page without CSS:
Source snippet (semantic menus):
