NYTimes.com Hand-Codes HTML & CSS

eldavojohn writes "The design director of NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, recently answered readers' questions in the Times's occasional feature 'Ask the Times.' He was asked how the Web site looks so consistently nice and polished no matter which browser or resolution is used to access it. His answer begins: 'It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.'"

Comments

W3C

[FST]

...and yet they get 455(!) errors. That's not very good. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnytimes.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0.

Re:W3C

[Bogtha]

Also, they use <br/> in HTML 4 and it is telling them that they shouldn't do that because some web browsers will think it's wrong.

No, it's not telling them that some browsers will think it's wrong, it's telling them it is wrong. Validators don't check to make sure browsers can understand your document, they check if you have made any syntax errors. Writing <br/> in an HTML document is wrong, regardless of any particular browser's handling of it.

Re:W3C

[Bogtha]

fix whiney warnings that have no real world effect?

I knew somebody would pop up with this misconception. Did you know that the web has already been through this — not once but twice — and proven you wrong?

Netscape 2 was quite aggressive when it came to guessing when ampersands were mistakenly unencoded. Cue lots of people not bothering to do things correctly, and saying things exactly like you are — "What's the point? It makes no difference!"

Then Netscape 3 came out. It wasn't as aggressive as Netscape 2. All those people who cut corners had to rush to fix all of their pages. All the people who did it correctly the first time around didn't have to do any extra work.

Now Netscape 3 still guessed a little bit — if you left off the semicolon, it would pick up on it and guess correctly. So lots of the dumb people from the previous example didn't learn their lesson, and skipped the semicolon.

Can you guess what happened? Yep, that's right, Netscape 4 came out and broke all their pages again. And all the people who did things correctly laughed at them.

Sure, if you don't bother to do things right, today's major browsers will probably guess that you're an idiot and work around your bugs. But there's certainly no guarantee that tomorrow's browsers will do so. When you can do things correctly right now for no effort, why on earth would you risk incurring extra work in the future? Is it really so difficult to type &amp; instead of &?

Re:W3C

[Bogtha]

<br /> is XHTML standard and <br> is the regular HTML 4 standard. Both are correct

No, one is correct for XHTML and incorrect for HTML, and one is incorrect for XHTML and correct for HTML. The NYTimes use HTML. That means the XHTML syntax is incorrect.

Re:W3C

[Bogtha]

while XHTML syntax is not strictly speaking correct HTML it is still valid HTML.

This is simply not true. It's incorrect and invalid.

What you may be thinking of is Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 specification. It lays out a series of guidelines that minimise incompatibility with legacy user-agents. This means that it is relatively safe to transmit XHTML 1.0 documents following these guidelines as text/html. What it does not mean is that those XHTML 1.0 documents magically become valid HTML documents. They are not.

Re:W3C

[beav007]

Be that as it may, Bogtha is correct. We aren't talking about what works here, we are talking about what the standard says. The standard for XHTML says to use a slash, the standard for HTML 4 says not to. That is the discussion, and really, the end of it.

Re:W3C

[Bogtha]

It may or may not be improper American English, but "misspelt" is certainly correct English. Consult the OED if you don't believe me.

This is far from the first time I've had an ignorant American attempt to "correct" my proper English into your regional dialect. It's pretty annoying and reinforces negative aspects of your national stereotype.

Doesn't everyone?

[consumer]

He doesn't mean that they hand-code every page -- he says very clearly that they use a CMS with templates. All he said is that they don't use a GUI tool to create the templates. This is true of just about any significant site. What is the imagined news here?

Re:Valid Markup != Good Code

[Bogtha]

An & sign in a link to a URL isn't a syntax error

Yes, it is. Don't just take my word for it, take a look at what the HTML specification has to say on the matter.

treating it as such would nullify all GET parameters after the first one.

You are confusing a URI with the representation of that URI within an HTML document. Just because it appears as &amp; in the document, it doesn't mean that's what you end up with after it has been parsed.