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.

Re:Bad example

[sigwinch]

Indeed. I'm looking at ESPN.com on a 1600x1200 screen under a recent Mozilla, and it is an unreadable, shitty looking pile of dreck:

• Text hanging across columns
• Inter-line spacing too small so the characters of one line physically overlap the previous line
• Ugly line breaks in the scores sidebar
• Content boxes that stick down too far and chop of the top of the box below
• Boxes that have their bottom part chopped off by the box below (they screwed it up both ways)
• Shitty Javascript menus with expander buttons tiled when they should be singlets
• Their "lite" site has hideous colors

And none of this is Mozilla's fault. When Part 1 of the interview came out last week, I looked at the side from Internet Explorer while I was at work. It looked more reasonable, as long as you used a magnifying glass: they hardcode all sizes in terms of pixels, and I have a decent monitor/video card. Morons, you're bus is leaving...

Another thing: the whole site is branded as "ESPN.com", but they forcibly redirect to espn.go.com. Forget the technical idiocy: these folks can't even manage a coherent branding strategy.

People make fun of the work I do using HTML 4.01, but they render nicely on most browsers, render usably on nearly all browsers, and validate so I have confidence that there aren't any lurking bugs.

Annoying! *groan*

[usotsuki]

Why does everything have to be candycoated and designed in ways to discriminate against us people who would use Mozilla if we had the choice but are hog-tied down (at our public library) into using Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. I'll go further and say that a decent Web page should be 100% viewable in ANY browser, not just the latest cream of the crop. Got Netscape 2.01 on one of those old 603e machines? Logged into some BSD box that uses lynx as its browser? I don't think it's proper to ban people from a site for stuff they can't help. If a page isn't viewable in Lynx, that's the coder's fault. All my pages are viewable with Lynx, *if I can help it*.

-uso.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to you *g*

Re:Annoying! *groan*

[h3]

Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4

Well, while the specific dot version may only be two years old, I believe the NS4 series was released in the '97-'98 timeframe, making the codebase in the area of 5-6 years old! That's half the age of the web!

And no, it's not hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. It is hard to code a page that will look correct and good, and do so in the most recent browsers, and use proper and conforming markup, and so on.

I've given up on NS4 as a developer. I make sure my pages are viewable and functional but I completely strip them of any layout- basically, they don't get styled at all, except for any tweaks required to make them viewable and functional- and provide a little notice of what to expect and urge them to upgrade. They work, but it looks like crap, but I think anyone using NS4 in this day and age probably understands the consequences of that decision (whether it's their own, or not).

-h3

Standards Compliant?

[Alethes]

The only downside is that it doesn't validate. Boohoo.

How can ESPN.com be touted as a site that is "saving bandwidth through standards compliance" when they're not standards compliant? It's possible to do all the absolute-positioning and other CSS tricks without making the site completely standards non-compliant.

I think the intentions are noble (encouraging upgrades to compliant browsers, reducing page weight with less code), but it seems like somebody didn't finish the job. That's fine if that's what they want to do, of course, but the behavior shouldn't be acclaimed as something other web developers should duplicate.

Relax, man

[michaelggreer]

Well, this guy is clearly not a "fucking idiot." He simply believes in practical solutions, and is not interested in abstract validation. I am a bit more to your side (I find, for instance, the opening of tags in javascript to be a nightmare maintanance idea), but I respect his approach. All of us know the difficulty of turning a Photoshop document from a designer used to print publishing, and turning it into a compliant web page.

Calm down. He's on your team. Don't be so absolute.

Arrogant and Clueless

[ajwade]

The absolute positioning trick destroys the layout in Galeon (I've got the minimum font size set to 22 for the sake of my sanity). The left hand column overlaps the centre column (although gecko should arguably character-wrap to prevent that), and some of the text in the boxes on the right is missing because it doesn't fit. And the only reason the line spacing isn't far to small is because I've overridden it in my user stylesheet to fix similarly brain-damaged sites. The "lite" site isn't much better.

To be sure, the page would likely look fine if I let Mr. Davidson dictate my choice of font size and browser. Presumably I should set my video mode to 800x600 as well, so as to conform to the desires of espn marketing.

Espn does have "every right to not consider the non-upgrader person". They also have every right to lock out the non-upgrader until they upgrade. But doing the latter is moronic. I don't visit warnerbrothers.com at all anymore due to similar rudeness despite the fact that my current browser is probably allowed.

Oh, and the whole point of "alt=''" is to indicate to the browser that the "images ... aren't important unless they are physically seen". It's to prevent the page filling up with [image] or similar notations in browsers that aren't displaying images.

& in HTML

[LiamQ]

& begins an entity or character reference in HTML, so a literal & needs to be escaped as &. Otherwise, you would have confusion in a case such as href="foo.cgi?bar=baz&copy=yes" (which is valid HTML but probably not what the author intended with that copyright sign in the URI).