21 Bandwidth is big

I think bandwidth is a huge seller. After I demonstrated to the senior execs in my company that their OLD website (done before my time) took over 100 seconds to load on a 56kbps connection, and that x% of their users were on dial-up (probably investors on AOL), THAT made some instant converts.

My biggest gripe now, is that the company that manages our investor relations site uses a closed proprietary system to generate html, and it’s horrible. Any company that provides a service to other companies (be it Investor Relations, Shopping carts, search results, blogs, etc) should know the added value of provided standards as part of their solution.

posted at 01:48 am on February 28, 2007 by Alex Williams

22 There is some really bad stuff around

I’ve recently been exposed to a substantial open-source app. It works well enough, but the HTML is possibly the worst I’ve ever seen, sometimes racking up over 3,000 validation errors on a single page, including such gems as preceding the HTML tag with some Javascript…
I asked the developers about it, and the response was that it had to be that way to work in IE, and it was far too difficult to make it work in other browsers. Some of doesn’t work in IE anyway, but I guess they will continue stacking worse HTML on top of bad stuff until it disintegrates, rather than fixing the core problem.
Not surprisingly the underlying PHP was of similar quality – spewing out hundreds of notice errors. When I reported them as bugs, they were all dismissed as bogus, saying that they were “not interested in fixing notice errors, only real bugs”.
I’m often incredulous that some developers even attempt to make wildly invalid code work across browsers – it’s just such a bad place to start from. To date, I’ve not convinced a single one of the error of their ways, and yet they still have jobs…

posted at 02:16 am on February 28, 2007 by MArcus Bointon

23 Untitled

I think sometimes people confuse valid markup with CSS layouts.

Nested tables, font tags, unquoted attributes, unsemantic markup and bold tags instead of proper headings…all of these can validate.

posted at 04:36 am on February 28, 2007 by Diane Soini

25 I'm surprised that experienced coders don't follow

Having been a programmer through project manager over the last 23 years (from programming COBOL & PL/1 on MVS mainframes, through C on Linux, LANSA and RPG3 on AS400s, and team leading/mamanging projects of all sorts on all platforms) I am still amazed that this fight is still being fought, or indeed had to be fought at all.

As an old mainframe programmer I am gobsmacked that coders of web stuff are not forced to sit through a structured walkthrough (SW) of their code before setting it live. Nothing gets presented unless ALL compile errors have been eliminated (for compile read validation or PHP errors) except for a very small subset of allowed errors & the reasn for leaving them is documented in the code

I’ve heard all the arguments about the web being ‘different’ (and so was Client Server, and RAD to name but a few trends I’ve seen in my time) & had a flaming row with my last (web) development team leader (I won – he was fired) as coding to published standards (whether branch, enterprise, customer or W3C) & conducting SW’s had a long history & was part of the culture in our firm – it was a holdover of our mainframe days & they usually resulted in tight , standard, and maintainable code with few errors, and usually delivered just a little bit late.

We had some projects with ‘the web is different’ PM’s that coded according to anarchy that is the web , they were delivered very very late, unmaintainable spaghetti, and bloated – when they dropped into crisis – an old hand (usually with mainframe background) went in and the 1st thing he or she did was stop all development & start running walkthroughs to establish a reasonable quality baseline & only when all was up to standard, was development continued. In the long run it saved time – although senior management usually went ape to discover NO progress being made for a little while – they were certainly convinced when presented with examples of the c***p code that had been produced to date.

regards
Kim
PS – In case you are wondering my job went to India :-(

posted at 06:49 am on February 28, 2007 by Kim Mihaly

26 Sleeping point is asleep

For those that are singing the praises of The Sleeping Point – what do you make of these snippets?

Reload that page in every browser known to man- they know exactly what to do with an <img> tag that doesn’t close.

Here’s someone who doesn’t understand XHTML. A compliant XHTML browser, being served application/xml+xhtml, will stop when it is served invalid code.

And the alt tag really isn’t necessary for every damn image on the page.

If you care about people who may be using screen-readers, yes it is. You wouldn’t leave the word [IMAGE] visible on the screen, so why leave it there for those people who use non-visual agents? Simply not acceptable.

posted at 01:16 pm on February 28, 2007 by Stephen Down

27 BLAME IT ON DEMOCRACY...

I’m always amused to see that a majority of the people who rabidly push for “validation”, “standards”, “accessibility” and all other current fads are lacking a formal education in graphic design or programming.

The irony is that, in pushing for a higher level of “purity”, we might be destroying the web’s most powerful trait: its democratic nature.

Think about these questions:

1. How much smaller the web would be if browsers just stopped displaying pages with errors in them?

2. How many “standard” advocates would have to get a job serving burgers if web-related development/design/work was a regulated profession, like medicine or law?

3. Wouldn’t regulation (as in “needing a license or college diploma”) immediately result in better coding practices across the board?

4. Wouldn’t regulation provide clients with greater assurance that the guy providing web services for them is capable?

5. How many people here would happily accept regulation?

Still don’t get my point? It’s simple: the more we raise the “technical bar”, the less democratic the web becomes. Do we really want that? Is that good for the average (non-technical)person?

Now, I’m not against standards or validation or any of that. I personally recognize the great value in all of that. I’m just pointing out that a dose of “impurity” is probably good for EVERYONE…

posted at 03:24 pm on February 28, 2007 by troy waters

28 Excellent points

@20 – Excellent point. It goes back of course to the old, Garbage in, garbage out philosophy. I use TextPattern to manage some of my stuff and it works great, as long as I continue to give it good code. Where I work we have a home-grown CMS built in ASP, and it is simply horrible. The code we have is backwards and anything but valid. ASP can be configured to generate Strict or Transitional XHTML, so the issue isn’t entirely the software you use.

@25 – I think the issue with Web developers is that the Web is so lenient with bad code. Browsers for the most part can work around errors and auto-close tags and such. So as for validation, I think that everyone who develops for the Web can and should be very careful with their code to make clean, structured documents. As for semantics, that becomes more of an issue of coding style. Good programmers can make something that is efficient and effective. Bad programmers can make something that is inefficient but still effective. The same for the Web. <strong> or <bold> is just as “effective” as <h1> in the sence that a Web Browser will give the desired result. An effective solution that is both inneficient and bad.

I think the Web lacks standards because they aren’t required to achieve the end result. But democracy and free (”as in free speech, not free beer“) information are what made the Web great 16 years ago and are what still make it great. Regulation is a bad idea and frankly won’t work. I think it’s our job as developers to do our part by utilizing standards and advocating their importance to clients, businesses and other developers.

posted at 05:22 pm on February 28, 2007 by Aaron Burrows

30 "Come back to me when...

…you’ve got a green tick” is a common refrain around here. :) Generally, I won’t even look at a CSS problem until the HTML is valid. We rely on the HTML Validator extension for Firefox – while it’s not perfect, it’s an internal “good enough” standard. The whole team uses Firefox, so the validation requires no effort; I know I’d never win anyone over by insisting they validate every single page any other way.

I couldn’t agree more with the point about the hidden cost of invalid markup (especially since, as the resident CSS guy, that cost is my time and hair loss). In an environment where we do have control of the HTML, there’s no excuse.

posted at 06:09 pm on February 28, 2007 by Ed Daniel

Discussion Closed

New comments are not being accepted, but you are welcome to explore what people said before we closed the door.

Got something to say?

Discuss this article. We reserve the right to delete flames, trolls, and wood nymphs.

Create a new account or sign in below if you’d like to leave a comment.

Forgot your password?

Subscribe to this article's comments: RSS (what’s this?)