:: Personal website of a Toronto web designer
Lately » It's about Standards
The Importance of Code Validation, By John FoliotAuthoring to standards allows developers a level of assurance that what they are posting to the web will be accessible not only to the popular browser of the day, but to any standards compliant user agent in the marketplace.
:: Sasha, at 01:03 am on Monday, 03. November 2003
Sasha is famous about shouting around "code with web standards", "people make pages that validate", "use CSS design instead of tables" etc.
I think writing HTML pages is like driving car, you should follow regulations but everybody brake them from here to there. My wife is always frustrated when car drivers do not stop when she wants to cross the street on the zebra. She is right but nobody stops car, at least here in Bosnia. People will always break rules but the most important thing is that "life must go on".
I think that nobody will make browser that alerts, "This page does not validate with W3C recommendations standards and will not be displayed!"
I support you in your efforts to promote good practices and make pages or Internet sites more usable, accessible etc. I am happy to see links to good pages. I suggest you to add more tutorials and articles to your HOWTO section of the site. From time to time I analyze your code and learn things but most of people are lazy and like to read well-structured articles "for dummies". My suggestion for you is to write "CSS page layout design for dummies".
:: zoka, at 07:41 am on Monday, 03. November 2003
I agree, and in your next tutorials tell us what's needed to make pages XHTML valid. For example, & -> &
:: vitez-koja, at 12:31 pm on Monday, 03. November 2003
[quote=Zoka]
I think that nobody will make browser that alerts, "This page does not validate with W3C recommendations standards and will not be displayed!"
[/quote]
If you serve your markup (XHTML) as application/xhtml+xml [1] and you forget one single ampersand (&), like vitez-koja said, Mozilla browsers wont render your page at all and it will give you line number where you have an error. Your page has to be well-formed as any XML document but that doesn't mean that your code has to validate. Only few sites have passed the XHTML test suite.[2] Sending XHTML as text/html is considered harmful.[3] On other hand, some people are horrified and confused that you can actually write invalid XHTML code and still validate.[4] At the end, visit "Hall of shame"[5].
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/NOTE-xhtml-me...1/#summary
[2] http://www.goer.org/Markup/TheXPhiles/
[3] http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
[4] http://www.annevankesteren.nl/archives/...-validated
[5] http://timandkathy.co.uk/validaq/
P.S.
Sasha, could you, please, add "Preview" button to this page?
:: Davor, at 03:30 pm on Monday, 03. November 2003
Dario and Mario made http://www.sarajevo-x.com as a valid xhtml site they do not use tables for layout design and their pages load so fast. People are coming there because they like to read gabage like "The Matrix Revolutions" "Britney Spirs"... that's the life.
I am trying to make pages that validate but if I have stiff deadline I don't care about alt atribute on some small 3px x 3px gif in the corner...
:: zoka, at 05:09 pm on Monday, 03. November 2003
Zoka, I must say, you are improving your English, seriously. I guess this is not the only site where you use it :-)
However, I am afraid, I don't agree with your points. I would rather compare car drivers with website users, and car makers with web designers/developers. I can imagine that everybody has a different way of driving, just like surfing. But car makers, hey, they can be very innovative, just like web designers, but they must follow very strict standards. Would you be happy with a car without seats, speedometer that counts cm/sec, and so on. We are only lucky; nobody is gonna crash and die because of a nested table or <CENTER> tag.
At least in my case, writing valid HTML documents also means time saving, for me, and for developers who come after me. Not all clients appreciate that, but that's another story.
I know, I am neglecting the Howto section. It hasn't been updated for months and I should be careful about giving any promises. For the time being, Koja, this is a pretty good guide:
Differences Between XHTML and HTML
http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp
Davor, gave us very good links here.
I should mention that I am in the group of authors who create XHTML documents but don't send them as text/xml mime type, mostly because of the browser limitations (IE6/Win!). Some consider it wrong, and they may be right, but I also think that there is lots of confusion regarding this.
I try to follow guidelines listed here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines
Also:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#media
[quote]
XHTML Documents which follow the guidelines set forth in Appendix C, "HTML Compatibility Guidelines" may be labeled with the Internet Media Type "text/html" [RFC2854], as they are compatible with most HTML browsers.
[/quote]
GIF is GIF, being it GIF87 or GIF89a. Why should MIME be able to tell the difference between all kinds of DOCTYPES out there?
Adding the "preview button" on the top of my priority list :-)
:: Sasha, at 11:52 pm on Monday, 03. November 2003
Preview button added. Let me know if there are any problems.
:: Sasha, at 04:11 pm on Tuesday, 04. November 2003
Useless scrawling facts:
Top 5 scrawlers:
(updated once a day)
556 Sasha
488 zoka
316 vitez-koja
235 Davor
58 mungos
