Slashdot Mirror
Return of the WaSP
No_Weak_Heart writes "After a brief hiatus, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has returned. Here's the story at Wired about this grassroots coalition which works to promote the adoption of web standards by authors, tool makers and in browsers. In a related vein, the Boston Globe has a comfy chat with Tim Berners-Lee, the guiding force behind many of those standards."
Well, yes, I don't think many people but the most hardcore of standards purists could claim that IE isn't pretty good at following the rules. Thats not the issue.
The issue is that it's not very good when the code doesn't follow the rules. The problem here is that IE "guesses" what you're trying to do.
This in itself isn't a bad thing and from an end user perspective is a damn good idea. If I go visit a site that someone has made a basic error then at least I can still view the content, their mistake doesn't prevent me from getting what i want.
The problem comes when people start getting used to writing sloppy HTML because it works on IE (yes, I made that mistake before I found the w3 validator and Opera) and when Microsoft products start producing sloppy HTML (Words and Powerpoint being two apparant examples, although I've not looked personally).
So yes, web-standards great idea. But there should be a standard on what to do with badly formed HTML too.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Canadian Cynic, canadian politics is less boring than you
Government workers and contractors, you have to (or already have) comply with Section 508 Accessability Guidelines (as stated in the article), which means that most of these pages need to be rewritten anyway, now's a good chance to knock out XHTML1.0 compliance while you're at it, and shoot for the Web Content Accessability Guidelines (WCAG) too ... so all those neat Powerpoint presentations that are autogenerated into HTML need to go!
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Getting to level A is not hard at all, anyone hit AAA yet?, I'm finding XHTML1.1 and WCAG-AAA a little bit to unwieldy for everyday web use
well...
Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML (and XML derivatives) it causes problems in browsers designed for the sight impaired (and therefore violates Section 508).
Slashdot also uses deprecated tags such as (font) and (b) rather than use CSS to change text presentation. I also don't see any structural flow such as using (H)eader tags to enable things like search bots to more accurately determine page content and weighted analysis.
So no, I would suspect Slashdot wouldn't stand up to WaSP scrutiny.
It's totally possible to create great looking tableless, liquid, three-column layout using CSS.
o script.htm
These sites have different tutorials for various column combinations and even backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.
http://www.glish.com/css
http://www.saila.com/usage/layouts
http://homepage.mac.com/realworldstyle
http://www.projectseven.com/whims/cssp_3box/3boxn
The beauty of not using tables is that you're seperating structure from presentation. Basically, around some content, you specify what it is (structure). In the case of Slashdot's side navigation, in the XHTML/HTML you'd might surround the content with a DIV tag and give it an id/class of "sidenavigation".
With tables, you're already forced to predetermine that you want to use it on the left column when you mark up the whole table in TD and TR tags.
So how's CSS better than tables? Well, once you've defined the structure in XHTML/HTML, you can use CSS to define the presentation to say, I want anything tagged as a "sidenavigation" to be a vertical box on the left side that's X pixels wide.
This presentation can be easily be altered by changing the CSS. You can tell CSS to move things to the right, maybe center it or whatever. And you can define a CSS specifically for handhelds. You can tell it to hide data, change font sizes, redefine colors, or anything you want. For the sight-impared, you could define the CSS to display it all in a simple, column-less layout. And since you have not predetermined the presentation in the HTML, the user could have defined their own stylesheets to override your CSS to present the content in the way they want it.
With HTML and CSS (and also the XML and XSLT recommendations), websites can be so much more flexible.
With proper HTML and CSS use, the abstraction at the presentation level doesn't actually break the structure. It merely seperates presentation from structure, while keeping structure together with the content/data.
Scott Andrew said it best here:
"...this illustrates a common misunderstanding about CSS. CSS is for separating structure, not content, from the presentation. Markup is meant to give meaningful structure to content. The content can come from a database or text files; the structure from page templates, a CMS or XSL transformation. Keeping your content free of meaningless structural elements allows you to pour your content into another structure suitable for different devices. CSS allows you to apply client-appropriate and easily-varied visual style to that structured output, without having to alter your markup."