Slashdot Mirror

That's not the role of the forward button; you want the link tag.
e.g.
<link rel="Next" href="day3.html" />

While not all browsers support these, it is well worth using them for those that do (such as Mozilla, iCab and Lynx). They are standard HTML/XHTML. For more examples, see this excellent article.

Well, I don't know if you consider the Dow Chemical Company in this category, but virtually every page is broken in Mozilla with Javascript code strewn across the screen; search forms, etc. don't work as a result.

The problem is that their HTML comments are screwed up with the wrong number of double-hyphen pairs. Mozilla parses them correctly per the SGML standard, the result being not what Dow intended; but IE parses them incorrectly, and IE's bug cancels out Dow's bug. Curiously Dow's own internal search engine does parse the comments per the standard, so you often see garbage JavaScript fragments (even in IE) - the same ones you see in Mozilla - where the summary for the search result page should go.

&trade;

HTML Validators only check that your HTML validates according to the HTML Recommendation. It does not test accessibility requirements that are not part of the HTML recommendation.

There are tools for testing the accessibility of a website. One of the best I've come across is Accessibility Valet - a much better tool than Bobby

Word supports ... html

I don't know what your experience is, but I have never been able to get any version of Word to emit valid HTML for any document, even the empty document. To say that Word supports HTML seems to me to be somewhat of an exaggeration, especially in the context of open standards.

HTML Help
WASP would be a good place for all newbs to start.
WASP
Find Tutorials is a good general tutorial finder.

PHP
First LAMP tutorial
PHP.net
PHP Help

There are tons of good .asp sites out there, but my guess is that's not what slashdotters are looking for....

I like this quote from Shutterfly about the issue, blaming browsers:

What we want to do is write once and have it work with everything," said Russ Sanon, senior manager for quality-assurance engineering at Shutterfly. "But it falls onto the lap of the individual browser manufacturer. There's nothing that we do that's proprietary. Everything that we write should work with W3C-complaint specs.

Funny. According to an html validator, I would put their site in the not even close department. I wonder how the QA manager could claim his page is standards compliant, when the front page is so obviously not (although it would be a lot closer if it at least had the right DTD...). Could be because he doesn't understand what we are even talking about? Sigh.

Well gee, if you'd learn a wee bit of HTML you wouldn't have to resort to profanity.

Talking of saving as HTML, has anyone managed to generate legal (as in passing validation) HTML in any version of MicroSoft Word on any OS from any DOC-format document (including the empty document)? Maybe W3C should sue them for trademark infringement. 8-) H++ anyone?

This is why &#8237

Whatever you do, please try to use some form of valid HTML. You can very easily verify that your HTML is valid using the W3C Validator.

What is valid HTML? I suggest you check out The Web Design Group web page for extremely useful information on the topic. Also, the W3C web site has the definative specifications of HTML. Don't get tricked into thinking your WSIWYG editor is going to give you anything even close to resembling a valid HTML document. If you are even remotely seriously about doing a good job, you owe it to yourself to learn the standards.

At this point I would normally insert the comment that knowing the difference between valid HTML and invalid garbage marks the difference between a professional and a kid in a basement with FrontPage, but unfortunately the kids in the basements are producing more valid documents.


Yes, not many sites use valid HTML, but that is their problem. Don't make it yours. As an analogy -- a whole lot of big name commericial software products contain buffer overflow exploits, but that doesn't mean you should be lax about letting them into your code.

Finally. Design your content first, then make the web site fit the content. NEVER make the content fit the page, or all you will wind up with is a fancy (usually broken) design that ultimately just wastes everyone's time.

Alan

I agree whole heartedly, the Web Design Group have a great set of guides and info on why standards compliance makes sense.

They also have a very good validator/bbs/tutorial etc etc.

style="border-bottom: [size] [style] [colour]" ... read on dood!

These errors are the most irritating, since the html doesn't read as invalid when you are writing it.

If a page isn't valid, it isn't valid. And if a web designer is so unprofessional (s)he can't write a valid web page, that's not the browser's problem.

http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi?url=h ttp%3A%2F%2Fbanjo.slashdot.org%2F

And that's just the errors--the resulting page was huge when I included warnings too.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

First of all, there was no such thing as "HTML 1".

HTML 4 Strict is useful even for "plain pages" because it provides style sheet hooks (CLASS and ID attributes), internationalization (LANG and DIR attributes, BDO element, entities for characters such as the euro), as well as useful new elements like ABBR and ACRONYM that allow you to give the long form of the abbreviation through the TITLE attribute.

HTML 4 Strict also adds accessibility aids such as the LABEL element for indicating the text associated with a form control.

Is that validator bug free?

Other than some trivial issues with XML and custom DTDs, yes, I believe so.

Does it remain unchanged?

Mostly. Check the changelog for details.

I've had it give tens of errors on site that are supposedly to spec.

Then the sites aren't to spec.

here Netscape goes and releases a browser that is buggy (I can't access certain web pages, among other things)

Are you sure it's not the Web pages that are buggy? Netscape shouldn't be blamed if Web authors can't bother to even think about standards.

(WDG HTML Validator)

Writing style sheets
Web Design Group's CSS Guide
ZDNet's CSS primer
W3C's CSS Guide
A full list of CSS properties (cheat sheet!)

The cool thing about CSS is it lets the author specify fancy layouts, colours etc, but older browsers etc do not rely on them at all - the heirarchical nature of the document remains intact.

Writing style sheets
Web Design Group's CSS Guide
ZDNet's CSS primer
W3C's CSS Guide
A full list of CSS properties (cheat sheet!)

The cool thing about CSS is it lets the author specify fancy layouts, colours etc, but older browsers etc do not rely on them at all - the heirarchical nature of the document remains intact.

Whether or not businesses should be forced to make reasonable accomodations (and whether or not the federal government is even remotely capable of defining reasonable) are questions for another time.

If a site does have crummy HTML or relies on Javascript (which I normally browse without due to security holes 1 through 3000), I will usually just go elsewhere.

Sometimes, if it's a site that features data I really want to see (ex: http://www.usskiteam.com/ has online access to national rankings, and I like to peruse them, so I have emailed the webmasters and suggest they convince using CGI instead of a half-arsed CGI/Javascript mess (using ASP, of course). No dice, but I had to try). My point, you ask?

It's worth emailing the webmaster. Occasionally they're completely ignorant and a pointer to htmlhelp.com will work wonders. If that doesn't work, going elsewhere would be my first choice.

On other occasions, I will bother to work around the problem (ex: at laxtv.com, a site that is probably down again, Javascript was required for the site to work. I read the Javascript, figured out the redirect URL myself, and went to it manually. Then I bookmarked that page, and I had access to the tv schedules and video feeds I wanted. In that case, mail to webmaster@host bounced. Gotta love professional web desgin.)

It all boils down to one key question: what is the information worth to you? Is it worth dealing with a registration scheme? Or is it only worth it if you can get in with a standard id such as slashdotid/slashdot?

You use CSS. See www.htmlhelp.com for more!

Web Accessibility Initiative by W3C

Accessibility by Web Design Group

best accessibility meme: gracefully degrading pages