The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

Standards Compliant Website

Could any of you please point me to a non-trivial non-IT related standards compliant website? I need some inspiration!

Indian Developer in India
Monday, January 12, 2004

Im not much of a web expert, but I just spent the weekend learning about HTML4, HTML4.01, XHTML4, CSS 1, etc. Or do you mean the Accessibility standards? As you can see it is all very confusing so I think you may need to be more specific.

Chris Ormerod
Monday, January 12, 2004

Sorry! I meant the HyperText aspects of it, although any inputs as to Accesability aspects as well would be most welcome.

Indian Developer in India
Monday, January 12, 2004

Unless you consider sports trivial, check out http://www.espn.com/

More info here: http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0203b.shtml#espn

Chi Lambda
Monday, January 12, 2004

When you say "standards compliance" you probably mean XHTML and tabless designs right?

I don't think anyone outside of IT cares about standards compliance.

This site *is* IT related, but I find it quite inspirational http://www.csszengarden.com/

Matthew Lock
Monday, January 12, 2004

replace "tabless" with "table-less"

Matthew Lock
Monday, January 12, 2004

Sports is certainly not trivial! Nice. Will add to my bookmarks. But then again, why "MSN"? http://msn.espn.go.com/ . The Zen Garden is well known at my workplace.

I am looking to redesign, first my own site and then, my clients'. Also, I am wondering should I move into .NET or stay with .ASP pages. Both we and our clients are pretty comfortable with what we offer, though certainly no great shakes.

Indian Developer in India
Monday, January 12, 2004

Moving to table-less design can greatly facility accessibility of a web site. Depending on where and who you do business with, a non-accessible web site could cause you to be sued (the USOC was successfully sued for the 2002 Olympics site being unusable by sight-challenged users).

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Monday, January 12, 2004

What does table-less design mean? and how do you achieve it?

chris
Monday, January 12, 2004

You use divs and css to position text and things instead of putting everything inside tables.

http://www.andybudd.com/blog/archives/000069.html

Matthew Lock
Monday, January 12, 2004

Tables already are at a bare minimum, in fact only in one section, to list books available. But I use a lot of frames.

Law suits. Interesting, though way beyond applicability over here (else, 90% of the gov. sites will be eligible for a lawsuit!). Two of my clients are not for profit orgs., with a very broad user base. Come to think of it, maybe I should apply accessibility standards to their sites.

Indian Developer in India
Monday, January 12, 2004

By the way why do so many "standards compliant" websites have such small fonts?

Matthew Lock
Monday, January 12, 2004

Why small fonts?

1. More information density (try to get as much on a single screen as possible)

2. I find them easier to read (I'd rather not have to move my eyes across a screen while I'm reading, otherwise it produces a reaction similar to all-caps for me)

3. Smaller fonts enable fancier layouts

Ankur
Monday, January 12, 2004

Another reason for small fonts is that setting fonts and layouts to a relative size doesn't quite work in the most common browswers today (you know who...)

So designers specify font sizes in pixels, which then are too small if you use a high-resolution screen. Sigh!

A.T.
Monday, January 12, 2004

It's much simpler than that - smaller fonts make you look a) trendier or b) smarter. No one has ever said anything intelligent using an oversized font. That's no flamebait, it's just how humans think.

Subconsciously, these web designers look at their sites and think: "Small. Verdana. I am so smart." The extra smart ones have font colors that are gray-ish and harder to read.

Monday, January 12, 2004

It's currently fashionable amongst some web designers to use small font sizes. Numerous rationales will be offered but it usually comes down to "I like it that way" ;-)

Ken McKinney
Monday, January 12, 2004

Also note that websites for the federal government cannot use persistant cookies, and you get looked at funny if you use session cookies.

This article is old, but still relevant.
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0401/041801h1.htm

So if you're making a site that could be deployed by any US Federal Govt. agency, then no cookies. Have to encode all session information in form values and the url.

Andrew Hurst
Monday, January 12, 2004

Regarding moving to .NET: at the moment you will have a bugger of a time trying to get ASP.NET to produce pages that will validate in anything. It produces bad html in some instances (page state, that sort of thing) and if you're even tempted to use the asp.net controls... some of the code they produce is a nightmare. I'd stick with ASP if it's doing everything you want, and you really want standards compliance that much...

ASP.NET v2 is supposed to fix all this by the way, with wonderful clean XHTML strict available. I'll believe it when I see it though.

Andrew Cherry
Monday, January 12, 2004

Are all uses of tables for positioning considered taboo? My company is using tables extensively for our order entry web application. We might have 10 or more controls layed out using a table. It seems like CSS positioning is more oriented toward grouping large chunks of content rather than a lot of small pieces of page elements.

chris
Monday, January 12, 2004

Using nested tables for layout is evil.

You waste bandwidth compared to a semantically layed out HTML page with CSS.

Nested tables are not going to be accessible and likely won't display nicely on small-screen devices like cellphones.

Changing the look and feel of the site will require a complete rewrite of the HTML.

Using semantic HTML (if you have a list of links, you put it in a UL, for example) and CSS has many advantages.

Learn to do 100% tableless design, then compromise a little on the areas where CSS falls short (due to IE's lack of proper CSS support compared to others).

Alot of people use tables just because they don't know any better.

Richard P
Monday, January 12, 2004

A list apart ( http://www.alistapart.com ) is non-trivial, standards compliant and has a lot of information covering use of standards and accessibility.

uncronopio
Monday, January 12, 2004

Thanks for that Andrew Cherry. "Alistaapart"? Ok. Will take a look see as well.

Thanks again one and all.

Indian Developer in India
Monday, January 12, 2004

I wonder if anyone *really* uses cellphones to look at the web?

The only place I know that has a large internet usage on their cellphones is Japan, and they tend to make a completely different site for cellphones as they typically only allow a few kbs of text.

Matthew Lock
Tuesday, January 13, 2004

I have never met anybody that does it in a regular basis or seriously. My low-tech cellular barely works as a telephone :( so internet is out of the question.

uncronopio
Tuesday, January 13, 2004

check out:
http://www.inc.com/
http://www.fastcompany.com/
http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup_v2/
http://www.wired.com/

to find more xhtml+css websites go to
http://www.9rules.com/cssvault/gallery.php

gunga
Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Gunga, (any chance you from the sub-continent?)

Ta.

Regards

KayJay

Indian Developer in India
Tuesday, January 13, 2004