Slashdot
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Re: Slashdot
Its my homepage, and has been for ~ 4 years.onion2k wrote:Do you read Slashdot? Do you comment there?
Just curious..
Lately, I'm beginning to prefer Digg for a variety of reasons - including better/more consistent html compliance.
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alex.barylski
- DevNet Evangelist
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- Location: Winnipeg
Re: Slashdot
Man...your really stuck on HTML/XHTML compliance aren't you?Roja wrote:Its my homepage, and has been for ~ 4 years.onion2k wrote:Do you read Slashdot? Do you comment there?
Just curious..
Lately, I'm beginning to prefer Digg for a variety of reasons - including better/more consistent html compliance.
Note to self: Never let Roja review my web site or web applications
As long as everything looks good and renders the same in IE and FF I'm happy as are most of my visitors...sure I have plenty of tables, but it's fairly optimized
p.s-I officially title you the "HTML/CSS compliance nazi"
Just kidding on that one
Cheers
- Maugrim_The_Reaper
- DevNet Master
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- Location: Ireland
If you believe that consistancy is really important, why are you serving XHTML using the "text/html" MIME type on http://www.quantum-star.com/ ?Maugrim_The_Reaper wrote:XHTML compliance is important for a variety of reasons - not least consistency.
That's not very consistant .. and it breaks the HTTP standard.
I comment all the time on there .. and if karma is any measure, I'm ace!
http://slashdot.org/~onion2k/
http://slashdot.org/~onion2k/
Re: Slashdot
Yes, I am extremely vigilent about compliance. Its not just important, its the bare minimum that anyone creating a webpage should do.Hockey wrote:Man...your really stuck on HTML/XHTML compliance aren't you?
I wouldn't be so confident about who "most of my visitors" are, and whether your site works for them.Hockey wrote:As long as everything looks good and renders the same in IE and FF I'm happy as are most of my visitors...sure I have plenty of tables, but it's fairly optimized
First, you have visually impared users - like me - who prefer compliant code so I can either increase the font size (yay liquid layouts), or use user javascript to allow me to. Of course, I'm not blind, so I have some flexibility. Legally blind users are making up as much as 5% of the browsing public on some major sites.
Next, you have mobile browsers. Cellphones are the primary browser for most people in the pacific region (China, Japan, etc). Mobile browsers do *far* better with valid code, and render faster. They can be as high as 8% of the user base.
Don't leave out dialup users, a group that deeply benefits from compliant code, because it renders faster, it transmits faster, and it caches (css) subtantially better. Those are no trivial improvements, and definitely make users happy. Considering that over 33% of viewers haven't made it to broadband, even in the United States, thats no trivial group.
Add them all up, and you've got the potential for alienating or degrading the experience for as much as half of your viewers. Worse, each of those groups are hard to detect. Visually impared users don't have a user agent string that says "BlindDude". Mobile browsers often spoof non-mobile browser user agent strings. Dialup users look like broadband users.
But ignore *all* of that, and use Links (text-based browser) as your primary browser for a day. Thats a very close emulation of how the blind see the web. After a day, you will be disgusted at just how many sites are flat out unusable because of their design choices - many of which ignore standards that have been around almost a decade.
In a nutshell, you don't know the majority of your users, you don't know their pain, and your flippant dismissal shows a lack of respect for people that are different than you. But hey, if you want to brush off that portion of your audience, so you can thumb your nose at simple standards that are trivial to comply with, feel free. It just shows exactly where your priorities are, so the rest of the world can make a similar value judgement about you and your design.
HTML compliance is about doing things the right way, to enable the largest possible audience access to your work. It shows that you care about professionalism, and about embracing the best practices on the net today.
Any professional that chooses not to do so isn't very professional.
- Maugrim_The_Reaper
- DevNet Master
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- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 5:43 am
- Location: Ireland
Try clicking the validation links at the bottom - it fails.If you believe that consistancy is really important, why are you serving XHTML using the "text/html" MIME type on http://www.quantum-star.com/ ?
That aside, Roja captures the reasoning behind compliance spot on. I'm one of those dial up users who resorts to Lynx if all I want is the content without the flashy layouts and graphics. It makes a measurable difference.