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190 Comments
- kethraal, on 10/10/2007, -3/+46"Its all this hacking up that is required to make the page look the same in all the different browsers."
Amen. I recently moved a major (10K hits per day) site from its table-based layout (circa 1998), to a modern XHTML/CSS layout. I built a XHTML 1.0 Strict three-column design which worked in all our non-IE browser targets -- about 4 hours of work or so. I then proceeded to spend an additional 2 hours getting our IE targets (6 and 7) to play nice with the template -- after which I had to spend another hour fixing all the XHTML/CSS validation errors that were introduced when I made the design IE-compatible. To recap: that's 7 hours of work to make a layout with fully-compliant XHTML 1.0 Strict markup and CSS2 -- almost half of which was due to IE's abysmal support for standards. On the bright side, there are now exactly zero CSS hacks used...
*****. - purplegecko, on 10/10/2007, -0/+30Don't be ridiculous. No matter how well you know HTML and CSS, IE is so bad that you will always have problems with differences.
It is good practice to design for more compliant browsers (Firefox, Opera) then move your design to IE. - SpookyET, on 10/10/2007, -2/+29That's bollocks. It's not that they don't want to comply to W3C standards, it's that due to the amount of content, they have to use a content management system. And, as we all know, 99% of the CMS and their WYSIWYG out there are *****. Pure *****.
- spicytuna, on 10/10/2007, -13/+37top website fail it too.. (google.com, yahoo.com, ebay.com, youtube.com etc...)
That's the problem with standards, there's too many of them. - TenebrousX, on 10/10/2007, -2/+23It's a tool the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the organization that creates standards for the world wide web, such as HTML and CSS - offers to make sure your web page code (the "markup") is valid, so it can be correctly rendered in standards-compliant web browsers
- onebit, on 10/10/2007, -5/+25Does the user really care if spacer.gif has an alt tag or not?
- jeriqo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+18spacers.gif shouldn't exist anyway.
- kahrn, on 10/10/2007, -4/+21Why did people digg this guy down? He asked a good question and if you've never been in web development before you might not have known either.
- fkr3, on 10/10/2007, -5/+21And there's no real benefit to using html standards. They don't make your site the same in other browsers, they don't make it faster or leaner or save you money or make you money. All they do is make it easy for other programs to read your data. If you want your data accessible with other languages and platforms use XML. I bet the top 20 popular blogs all provide an RSS feed.
- creatvt, on 10/10/2007, -2/+17"This probably means that complying to the W3C standards is not a priority for the most popular content creators on the planet."
That's right.
Having a (very) large readership seems to demonstrate to them that there are no issues about being able to read their content... - wiifm69, on 10/10/2007, -3/+17Its all this hacking up that is required to make the page look the same in all the different browsers. http://www.crashie.com/ FTW
- conekt, on 10/10/2007, -8/+22It really doesn't matter. Really.
- dunkin, on 10/10/2007, -1/+14A browser typically renders standards based pages quicker and with fewer problems that sites with messy code. So it does impact users. Most Compliant pages are smaller in file size so it keeps the hosting costs down too. Standards based sites translate better to other platforms (phones, print, screen readers). Your results may very.
Blog and CMS sites don't usually validate because they're using WYSIWYG tools. Computers aren't as good at marking up as humans are. That's what we're seeing here (that's all).
From my experience its people that are too lazy or simply don't know how to write valid code that bitch and moan about standards. That's fine. I'm just sick of seeing it every time someone mentions W3C. - brangan, on 10/10/2007, -25/+38What is W3C markup validation?
- shiftt, on 10/10/2007, -9/+19"This probably means that complying to the W3C standards is not a priority for the most popular content creators on the planet."
No *****. There's a big difference between making the site look identical in all major browsers and modifying it to W3C Validation Specs.
Don't get me wrong, I support clean well structured code as much as the next guy... but would I waste time on changing every "&" to "& amp" ? Hell no.
/ ps: space added so digg wouldn't parse it. - p0tent1al, on 10/10/2007, -2/+12A person with a screen reader will.
- p0tent1al, on 10/10/2007, -4/+14Diggers for some reason feel the need to digg down people who ask questions. I would rather myself save that for when someone is being an idiot, rather than asking a legitimate question.
- unitheory, on 10/10/2007, -2/+12the standards are meant to avoid going through all the trouble of testing with different browsers.
I can't stand it when sites display the w3c image and then fail the validation. - decades, on 10/10/2007, -1/+11The bigger and more popular the blog, the more adverts and comments there will be. The more 'external input' a website has, the harder it is to maintain constant validity. This doesn't surprise me.
Oh, and naturally =)
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Ftech_news%2FTop_blogs_fail_W3C_Markup_Validation&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
This page fails too. - chrysalis, on 10/10/2007, -8/+17So what?
From a user point of view, what matters is that the site works.
If the site validates or not, what does it change? Nothing. A site that validates doesn't mean that it will render ok in all browsers. And a site that doesn't can. - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -9/+17I love how people defend these sites but bash MS for not complying with standards.
- RobertBogley, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9fkr3 is right with one exception - when developing pages, its really useful to have the development environment validate your html (xhtml) to standards since you know (a) your page is more likely to work first time in each browser and (b) you know you've closed all your tags in the right place which saves bugs later.
Worse than that is for those of us who develop web pages in IE we have javascript validation and debugging turned on, you get "Do you want to debug, Yes or No" error messages popup from digg (got it when I clicked reply to this for the first time), google (got it last week on mouseover google toolbar "download now"), amazon and loads of other sites. - fishfishfish, on 10/10/2007, -2/+10It doesn't apply much to blogs that are run by an individual, but if you're working on a project with other developers and you're all producing code that complies with W3C standards I'd argue that it makes development easier.
With a Firefox extension like Tidy, which puts a tick, warning triangle or error message in the corner of the browser when the page loads, it's quick and easy to see whether the code you're working on contains any markup errors. I've worked on some horrible tag soup produced by other developers and found it a nightmare to decipher, compared to nice, lightweight standards compliant semantic XHTML.
There are a lot of us who would probably agree that it's just shoddy workmanship to develop a site that didn't meet the standards we're recommended to adhere to. - desibabu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Add these html / css Evangelists to the list
http://meyerweb.com
http://mezzoblue.com/
http://www.airbagindustries.com/
http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/
http://hicksdesign.co.uk/
http://www.veen.com/jeff/index.html
Even Eric Meyer does not pass the test, they should at least practice what they preach - p0tent1al, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8Sometimes you have to hack the code for IE against the W3C standards, which can explain a lot of this. Instead of complaining at all these blogs, go complain about Internet Explorer and Microsoft not doing it's job.
- noahhoward, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7You say seven hours like it is an obscenely long time...
- johnIRL, on 10/10/2007, -2/+8There are plenty of benefits(text readers for the visually impaired), it would work better if IE worked with them correctly though.
- mithrasinvictus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7Conditional comments keep other browsers and the validator from tripping over the IE hacks.
Microsoft should be held accountable for all the effort wasted on supporting their substandard crap. - DrBob, on 10/10/2007, -3/+9> but would I waste time on changing every "&" to "& amp" ? Hell no.
perl -pi -e "s/&/& amp;/g;" [files-to-modify]
(I added a space too) - mithrasinvictus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7That's a problem when you develop for IE and then add support for other browsers as an afterthought. If you code for standards and then hack for IE it costs half the time and works in twice as many browsers.
- Egoist, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7As long as browsers don't follow W3C standards, there's no reason to expect websites to follow.
- dunkin, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6No. You're wrong.
ESPN is saving 2 terabytes a day from moving to a standards based design. That's real money in the bank bucko.
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview - noahhoward, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5The way it should be done, at least the way I wish it would be done, is to build your site so it displays perfectly in other browsers then, if OK is all IE can handle, OK is all you make it. Don't let the display break, but don't break your back making it look exactly the same. Then slap a message at the bottom explaining that the user is missing functionality because their browser is buggy. Perhaps when IE's user-base starts complaining about all the bugs MS will do something about it. IE7 was a start but it'd be so much nicer if they'd just fix the damn thing.
- Nanobe, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5RSS isn't an alternative to HTML; it serves a completely different purpose. The only XML alternative to HTML is XHTML, which in practice isn't widely implemented as XML (in the most common configurations, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera will all handle your XHTML using their classic HTML tag soup engine, not an XML parser, and will follow HTML-specific CSS and scripting quirks that aren't supposed to apply to XHTML).
As for the benefits, yes, there are plenty of benefits. Following standards eases code maintenance; it usuallyt produces leaner, more bandwidth-efficient markup (semantic markup compared to table layouts); it makes accessibility a much more attainable goal; etc. As a web developer who has to maintain sites with poor markup and sites with good standards-compliant markup, I can say with experience that standards make my job dramatically less stressful. - strictnein, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Did you prefer websites before they were called "blogs"? This may come as a shock to you, but for the most part there is nothing new or unique about the "blog" format. "Major" gaming sites from back 11 or 12 years ago were in formats that would today be considered "blogs". Take Bluesnews.com for instance:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961226231646/http://bluesnews.com/
That would be considered a blog now, but back then it was just a normal website. - noahhoward, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6That is the attitude that leaves us tied to IE. Why should I bother doing a good job when no one is going to check?
Personally, it is because people like me get hired then have to fix your ***** messes. - Leevi, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7http://www.msn.com/ Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict! So, Microsoft follows standards every now and then. Smaller sites don't exactly have the manpower to do the same. Time is money and there are plenty of things to do, you know. And btw, google fails at W3 test (I guess they are too busy making money)
- twenty3inhouse, on 10/10/2007, -4/+9I have the same experience all the time. The cost of web development could be much more affordable if IE wasn't such a bucket of *****. Just imagine what could be achieved if all the developers didn't have to waste 50% of their time on IE. I hope microsoft gets crippled the way IBM did and that Bill Gates dies getting ***** up the arse by a massive *****. No amount of charity work can make up the damage he's done to the computer industry, or the frustration he causes to every computer user all over the world every day. Just so he can be rich, ***** him!
- Jugalator, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6The W3C markup validation service: http://validator.w3.org
edit: ooh, i see it's sort of Web 2.0-enhanced these days. - fryguy1013, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5I'm pretty sure those kind of urls are *supposed* to be escaped with & (I remember a w3c warning on my php pages a while back)
- kevincannon, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Good question. It's a way of checking if the code used to create a page matches industry standards.
Open standards are generally a good way to increase competition of a technology rather than having a proprietary standard set by a specific company. For the web, the organisation who sets these open standards is called the W3C. Unfortunately, these open standards weren't that well used in the past, and as you can see from this story, even very popular sites, still don't validate to these standards.
If you'd like to read more about standards here's some good links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standards_organization - Nanobe, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Every major web browser development team agrees that the W3C standards should be followed. Yes, even Internet Explorer. In fact, the only reason IE has as crappy standards support as it does is because Microsoft abandoned IE platform development for five years after IE 6 (for context, IE is only about 10 years old right now). IE 6 actually had fairly decent standards support at the time it was released. Most of their nonstandard features like IE's event model were designed and implemented before there was any standard at all. So no, that "there's too many of them" argument doesn't hold water. Browser developers aren't disagreeing on which web standards to follow; they just have different levels of progress implementing those standards. The standards are, after all, rather big and complex.
Websites which choose to not follow the W3C standards mostly do so out of ignorance or laziness, not because they're supporting some alternative standard. - badriram, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Funny... msn.com is the only one that validates, that too xhtml strict. Looks like folks like MS care more about standards than most of the other people that bitch about it.
- kahrn, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5It's not really a suprise that some top blogs fail validation. Not everybody agrees with it, and as long as it works with 3 or so major browsers then people shy away from it. Google is a good example.. it works with almost everything yet it still fails validation. I guess w3c should be a guideline, but you shouldn't necessarily follow it precisely.
As long as it 'works'. Still, I'd like to see google and other top sites set an example. But anywho, it's not the end of the world (and it's not really news, either.) - mithrasinvictus, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5The rendering is predictable and does not depend on browser interpretations, debugging a validating page is easier and it should ensure your page will be displayed correctly in future browsers.
- webtroll, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4The homepage Digg.com does, the article/comment pages don't ;-)
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5*****;)
- noahhoward, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4You didn't read it at all did you? You make the page so it looks good even if it doesn't look exactly like your proper design, hell make it plain text if that is all you want to deal with. Then you add the message, "Issues with your browser are preventing aspects of this page from being displayed. Click here to report this issue to Microsoft, or click here to view a list of more suitable browsers."
Progressive enhancement, people, IE is not a prime display device, and should never make it up to prime display. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html#history
Of course now Yahoo lists IE 6 as an A Grade browser, never used to be and still isn't especially when you consider CSS but whatever, I don't write the articles. - Numfar28, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Also, you mean the alt attribute. There is no alt tag. Common mistake.
- thailand1972, on 10/10/2007, -1/+4Has anyone ever been told by someone : "I couldn't screen-read your images because they had no alt tags and I'm partially/totally blind"? Or how about : "I couldn't navigate your site because I can't use a mouse and couldn't tab through your site via the keyboard?"
When a website has business concerns, is it better to cater to 99.9% of your readership, or spend 25% of your time worrying about every aspect of accessibility just so you cater to .1% of the population.
Actually, in reality, you're just worried about what other developers will think of your code....and it would be worse to be ridiculed by fellow developers for not following the latest arbitrary rules than actually giving a damn about the tiny minority of disabled visitors who may chance upon your website.
What's the next sword of Damocles for web developers? -
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