Beta Feedback

The colors chosen for the website are pleasing and soft on the eyes.  
Layout and navigation has been greatly simplified. Creating more  
marginal space has made it much easier to focus on key content. In my  
personal opinion, the website is 90% the way there.

Changes I would like to see:
- "#w3c_mast" is using a 3px solid border while "#w3c_main" uses the  
background image "left_nav_sim," which uses a gradient. I would  
suggest using only the solid border. The gradient disrupts consistency  
and flow.
- Use "page_bkg.jpg" on both sides or none. I was surprised to see the  
content area size dynamic while still having that border on the right  
side, and none left of the static left menu. Possibly though, use of  
this gradient border is disruptive to the flow, similar to what I  
explained above, and use of a solid color border would fix this. If  
there is a border on the right, make a border on the left.
- ".title" overlaps the gradient border by 1 or 2px. It has padding- 
left: 20px, but margin: 0px. I would make margin-left: 20px to make  
the background flush with the content text, and allow the text to flow  
in 20px.
- For all "a" that have no "href" remove the underline that appears on  
mouseover. I think that could be done by "a:active{text-decoration:  
none}" but with your current code layout, giving an active link a  
class and removing href, just add the attribute to the given class.
- Keep the space between "#w3c_crumbs" and ".title" the same as the  
space between ".title" and "#w3c_content_body" (could add  
h1.title{margin-top: 20px}).
- Vertically align the top of the side menu with the top of "h1.title"
- Use of the image "headline" looks like the color just needed more  
screen space, but complicates layout when moving from the home page of  
news to any other page that incorporates .title and a background-color.
- The highlighting done using ".bMember", ".testimonial" and ".block"  
is a great color variation. I would like to see that used more often  
to separate content flow.
- With ".w3c_image" change padding from "0.2em" to "2px". It's not  
creating a uniform padding around all images in Firefox and IE8  
(though it does seem to be working uniformly in Safari and Chrome).
- For cross-browser uniformity I may suggest changing ".w3c_image"  
border from "thin" to "1px". For some reason IE renders "thin" at 2px.
- On the top menu, remove the line left of "STANDARDS" or place one to  
the right of "ABOUT W3C"
- At the end the page, where the jQuery package is included, there is:
<![CDATA[
//]]><![CDATA[

<!-- -->
//]]><![CDATA[

]]>
between the script tags. Maybe there is a reason for this I'm not  
aware of, but if there is no script then why this?

Anyway, this is what I saw at first glance.

Trevor Norris