HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

[Gary Thorpe]

David Cuthbert wrote:

Oh, I definitely *should* care.  But, eh, engineering anything decent
always includes a chapter on working around annoying constraints, so
while I can sympathise with the problem, I just chalk it up to "just
another imperfect system one can work around."  The annoyances of
dealing with quirky hardware far outstrip the quirks of web browsers.
Personally, I limit myself to simple tables and font styles.  Oh, I
know about the advantages of CSS and such; but preprocessed HTML works
much more reliably.


Using tables to format text is bad style and the ugliest but most 
popular hack on the internet. It doesn't "look" that fancy when you have 
to use a text browser (instead of the memory gobbling mozilla).

And if you seperate the style from the content, it will be easier to 
maintain: will it be easier to go through and edit a dozen documents 
that have particular fonts or edit the one stylesheet they all included 
for the same look and feel?

Of late, I've even foregone much of that, limiting myself to Wikis and,
when a Wiki isn't available, wrapping everything in <pre> tags (see
http://www.kanga-da.org/ for example).


This is dirt simple to do in standard HTML and you won't have to rely 
and manually inserting tabs/spaces: the layout cannot be that crucial 
anyway.

<shrug>  Maybe if I were a designer, instead of an engineer, in a
different life.

Dave

James Frazer wrote:

You should care.  If more people cared about web designers using 
proper markup then browser designers (microsoft) would be more willing 
to make their browsers so that they don't suck.   Consequently the web 
designers could spend more time on content and less time fixing 
strange Internet Explorer rendering problems.

Web designers use a number of 'sick' hacks to make things display 
properly on bad browsers - IE5/IE6 - there is a lot of overhead in 
dealing with strange IE problems.

I think this time could be better spent on improving the overall 
content and features of the site.  Unfortunately users don't care 
about valid markup, nor do they care whether or not their browser 
impliments things properly.

So yes, valid markup is important.

--James

David Cuthbert wrote:

Eh.  As a user, I don't care whether the underlying site is valid XHTML,
HTML, XML, SGML, PDF, EBCDIC, ..., just so long as it's visually
appealing and I can read it.


I care when I choose/have to use alternate web browsers (like lynx or 
links) and cannot find any content.

There are arguably 30-40 other concepts/sites which are equally
compelling to link.