Saving Bandwidth Through Standards Compliance, Pt. 2

elijahao writes "In case part one of the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN was interesting, the second part has been posted today."

Comments

Redesigning

[Anonymous Coward]

Having recently been involved in a site redesign of a large site using a CMS I can sympathize with the issues at work. The biggest struggle I faced was that our company used an outside design firm to come up with a "look." There was little understanding of the issues around building a template driven site and they came up with a design totally unsuited to the project. We (IT department) were given a handful of layered Photoshop files and expected to code behind them.

Bad example

[JimDabell]

One step forward, two steps back:

Positioning footers is a huge Achilles heel of absolute positioning. It is ridiculous that you cannot embed three absolutely positioned columns within a master div and then position a footer below that master div. This is a well known problem of absolute positioning and there are a few workarounds, none of which are very elegant.

Actually, it's dead simple to do this with css 2. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't support a decent amount of css 2. Having said that, there are plenty of workarounds that work in Internet Explorer that aren't anywhere near as bad as this:

The workaround we settled on for the front page was simply positioning our partner's footer a concrete pixel value from the top of the screen. Since our front page is always roughly the same length, we don't need to worry about any of our columns creeping down into the footer.

Excuse me? How on earth can they possibly know how high their home page is? That would depend on the size of the text, which depends on the font size I've picked to surf with.

Then there's validation. Telling me my site needs to validate in order to be standards-compliant is like telling me I need a flag in my lawn to call myself an American.

What a fucking idiot. Validation is a mechanical syntax checking of the document. If your site doesn't validate, you aren't conforming to the rules of HTML/XHTML. It's more like saying he needs to be an American citizen to call himself an American.

For a simple, small, text-heavy site like a blog, validation may come relatively easily, but when you have a site like ours which dynamically writes out a lot of content, uses third-party statistical tracking, makes liberal use of Flash, and offers complex and flexible advertising modules, validation is simply a pie in the sky.

Okay, let's take these things one at a time:

Sometimes we dynamically open divs and other tags with document.write and the validator can't figure out why we're closing a tag which appears not to be open.

If you are closing an element (not tag), then it had better be open. If you open the element via a script, close it via a script, otherwise you are not following the specifications. The validator can't "figure it out" because it isn't compliant code. This guy seems to think that the use of client-side scripting somehow makes invalid documents magically valid.

Our ad server requires us to send ampersand-delimited variables to it which are not URL-encoded and the validator treats any ampersands in your code as invalid.

It's a one-liner in most languages to fix this. If you are using a third-party ad server, then ask them to give you compliant code, it should be part of your contract to reduce business risk anyway.

Our statistical tracking code puts id attributes to certain script tags, which the validator claims is not valid.

Sounds like exactly the same thing. Ask your suppliers to give you code that follows the specifications.

We sometimes do not include alt tags for images which aren't important unless they are physically seen. Some people will say "Just include alt=''", but I simply don't agree with including alt tags for the heck of it.

Well existing user-agents treat empty alt attributes differently to missing alt attributes, and for good reason. It may mean little to him, because he doesn't use that software, others do. That is why you follow specifications, so all user-agents get a good deal.

We display all of our Flash elements using a home-spun JavaScript delivery method which is way more flexible and compatible than even the method Macromedia recommends.