Web standards.
This afternoon, wanting to feel geeky, I googled singapore “web standards”. I was rewarded with several findings. Some of them thrilled me because today I realise there were efforts to form a local web standards community, and some made me laughed off my chair because they’re just too funny — weird kind of funny.
Seriously.
Validated and compliant to W3C standards?
I came across a couple of web designers’ (company’s) sites that stated “All our sites are validated and compliant to W3C standards.” or something to that effect, and then there’re 2 buttons hanging around that read “XHTML 1.0″ and “CSS” with a tick on each button.
(And I feel better not to mention the URLs lest I get sued for defamation.)
You’ve guessed it right! They mean that the site is written in XHTML 1.0 (Strict or Transitional) and that CSS is used to render the presentation (hopefully). And I’m proud of them to be doing so!
Initially.
Until I realise they were using tables. Or most of them, anyway.
Compliant to W3C standards? Not by following the so-called standards blindly. And validation doesn’t make your site a “standard” site.
Learn your craft well enough, and then start selling them. Not the other way round.
Some CSS tricks
Firstly, Image replacement techniques are very popular, and many. Much of them seek to solve accessibility issues, but amazing, one of the web designers’ company sites I went to, enclosed no text without the IR tags.
That alone, have totally shown that they have no clues what they’re doing and are just following the trend blindly. Most of the advantages and reasons for using IR are lost.
What a pity.
I’m using semantic HTML too!
Secondly, semantic HTML doesn’t mean using
<span style="font-weight: bold;">text</span><b>text</b> is all you need. The latter saves you a whole lot of code size and both of them mean show the same presentational effect. If you wish to add some effects, simply assign rules to b or i, and there we’ve got what we want.
Semanticity(is there such a word?) really means using meaningful tags for your content, when it’s a header, you use h. When it’s a paragraph, you use p. When it’s a list of links, or information, you use ol or ul. Trying to wrap everything up in div instead of their proper tags is a good attempt(and I applaud you for your efforts at least) to seperate presentational layer from the structural layer, but that doesn’t mean you have a “standard” site.
I use XHTML so I’m gosu.
And claiming to be W3C compliant by using XHTML and then some, when the site is really laid out using tables, is a joke. Sure, you can pass the validation with Transitional DTD but that doesn’t mean your site is a “standard” site. That only means you’ve taken the effort to pass the validation. Period. And good job for doing so, anyway.
Try using Strict DTD (XHTML 1.0). And then validate. We’re not even going into the details of serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml instead of text/html. Do we really need XHTML?
Using XHTML with tables layout is bad enough, and then the companies decide that they have to advocate “web standards” like they really care. I think it’s all but marketing gimmicks. They are cheating the clients — I went to their portfolio and discovered 100% of the sites were laid out using tables.
Simply put, XHTML just means you have to stick to a stricter set of rules because you have to so you can seperate presentations and contents. In fact, in both HTML and XHTML, you can achieve the same goal. There is no obvious difference unless you decide to serve your document as application/xhtml+xml, then that’s another story for another day.
(I’m using HTML 4.01 DTD in v4, in case you want to know.)
Web standards Singapore!
There was an effort to group local web standards advocates about a year ago — I’m too late. But nevertheless, I e-mailed to ask more. Wow, this is truly exciting to find a group of my own, in Singapore.
Woohoo.