May 7, 2007

About the EVE-Central.com Interface

I get the occasional question about someone’s browser being seemingly stuck in “IGB” mode. Usually, its not actually stuck, the user was simply expecting some more graphical pizzaz out of EVE-Central.com.

So, why is the interface so bland? Maintainability is the primary reason. The EVE-Online in game browser is a rather buggy, slow, and temperamental beast.

CSS support is worse than Netscape 4, and performance is akin to a Pentium 66 rendering a huge table - it just can’t do it without a week long crunch. Hence all of the market information is limited (only 10 entries or so per table, etc) and no stylesheets or other fun stuff is used. So why is the main, non-IGB interface so bland too? Primarily for not having to maintain two sets of templates and remembering to update both to fix something or enhance something.

I’ve had some contributions for new designs, which come in all sorts of nice colors and DIVs and Javascript - but didn’t really enhance the datamining aspects of EVEC. We’ll just call the look the Google 1.0 look and work on adding newer features.

© 2020 Yann Ramin