Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers http://www.attackr.com Come To Share, Come To Learn Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:09:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Why Most Sites Don’t Bother With Web Standards http://www.attackr.com/why-most-sites-dont-bother-with-web-standards/ http://www.attackr.com/why-most-sites-dont-bother-with-web-standards/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:00:58 +0000 Karen http://www.attackr.com/?p=185 If you are a coder, and you are proud to write valid XHTML and CSS based sites, you’ve probably noticed many big sites like Google.com, Yahoo.com, etc, don’t have valid code and in fact have warnings, and the odd error, according to the results I get when I use my HTML Tidy Firefox add-on.

So why is that? You would think that the developers for those sites are top-notch and well-versed in current web standards. And the answer is, the average visitor to these sites don’t give a fig about web standards and are not viewing source code when they are browsing, searching the web, or whatever. Those web giants know that the single most important thing on the web is to provide what people are looking for and that is information.

Content is far more important then whether HTML code is perfectly formatted. The average site visitor doesn’t know and doesn’t care about perfect code. Web designers who code according to web standards are appreciated by some, I’m sure , but they are really only judged by their peers. Web designers and their clients need only worry about how to please the target market of the web site. Nothing else matters.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/why-most-sites-dont-bother-with-web-standards/feed/ 6 Structuring your HTML code http://www.attackr.com/structuring-your-html-code/ http://www.attackr.com/structuring-your-html-code/#comments Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:19:15 +0000 niemi http://www.attackr.com/structuring-your-html-code/ We talk a lot about semantic and valid HTML. What people tend to forget are the structure of their HTML code. If you take a look at the source code of ten random sites, chances are that nine of them are very messy €“ source code-wise.

Is it worth spending time on structuring it probably? After all it doesn’t affect anything. Spiders don’t care and general users won’t notice as they won’t check your source code, most people don’t even know what that is.

In general, if you can say that no-one is going to look at your source code, then structuring is meaningless. But you will be surprised how often your source code could be viewed.

You really should structure your HTML code if you can answer yes to one of following questions:

1. Did I make the site for a person/company that is going to update the content themselves directly in the HTML?

2. Did I make the site to promote my skills a web designer, maybe as a part of a portfolio?

Alright, but how do I structure the HTML?

First of all, get rid of your favorite code-editor. The way they show the code tend not to match the way it is looks after it has been interpreted by the browser. Open your .html/htm in Windows Notepad, and clean it up.

Keep related code without any breaks and with the same left margin. Either use breaks to separate different groups of code, or better, descriptive comments. Related code could be the code within the HEAD tags. You could categorize your header by grouping it up with HTML comments. Separate links to .js from links to .css and separate META tags from .js and .css.

Example of good HTML structure.
Example of bad HTML structure.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/structuring-your-html-code/feed/ 2 Avoid These Common XHTML Errors http://www.attackr.com/avoid-these-common-xhtml-errors/ http://www.attackr.com/avoid-these-common-xhtml-errors/#comments Fri, 18 Aug 2006 19:54:49 +0000 Karen http://www.attackr.com/avoid-these-common-xhtml-errors/ Many visitors to my site have downloaded my XHTML templates and then email me to show me how they are using my work.

Some are less-experienced coders or do not really know how XHTML differs from HTML.

Here are the most common errors I’ve come across:

  1. Not closing empty elements
    • Wrong: <br>
    • Right: <br />
  2. Not closing non-empty elements
    • Wrong: <p>This is a paragraph.<p> This is another paragraph.
    • Right: <p>This is a paragraph.</p> <p>This is a second paragraph.</p>
  3. Improperly nesting elements
    • Wrong: <em><strong>This is random text.</em></strong>
    • Right: <em><strong>This is random text.</strong></em>
  4. Nesting block-level elements within inline elements
    • Wrong: <em> <h2>About Us</h2></em>
    • Right: <h2><em>About Us</em></h2>
  5. No alternate text for images (using the alt attribute, which helps make pages accessible for devices that do not load images or screen-readers for the blind)
    • Wrong: <img xsrc="images/logo.jpg" />
    • Right: <img xsrc="/images/logo.jpg"
      alt="Company Logo" />
  6. Not putting quotation marks around attribute values
    • Wrong: <td colspan=2>
    • Right: <td colspan="2">
  7. Using the ampersand outside of entities (use &amp; to display the ampersand character)
    • Wrong: <title>Love & Marriage</title>
    • Right: <title>Love &amp; Marriage</title>
  8. Using uppercase tag names and/or tag attributes
    • Wrong: <BODY><P>My Web Site</P></BODY>
    • Correct: <body><p>My Web Site</p></body>

By making sure you don’t make the above mistakes, you are well on your way to having an XHTML website that will validate.

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