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Slashdot

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:26 am
by onion2k
Do you read Slashdot? Do you comment there?

Just curious..

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:29 am
by feyd
Used to read it religiously, very rarely posting. Right now, I haven't hit the pages in quite some time -- too busy with other things.

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:33 am
by patrikG
I've subscribed to their RSS feed in my Thunderbird, but generally prefer Digg these days due to its broader spectrum and less cynicism.

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 12:04 pm
by pickle
I read it every day - it's integrated into my Google homepage. I've never commented though.

Re: Slashdot

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 1:13 pm
by Roja
onion2k wrote:Do you read Slashdot? Do you comment there?

Just curious..
Its my homepage, and has been for ~ 4 years.

Lately, I'm beginning to prefer Digg for a variety of reasons - including better/more consistent html compliance. :)

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 3:38 pm
by Deemo
i have it on RSS in Firefox and i check it out daily. Never comment though.

Digg is pretty good too, its just hard to break the habit of Slashdot :P

Re: Slashdot

Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 11:31 pm
by alex.barylski
Roja wrote:
onion2k wrote:Do you read Slashdot? Do you comment there?

Just curious..
Its my homepage, and has been for ~ 4 years.

Lately, I'm beginning to prefer Digg for a variety of reasons - including better/more consistent html compliance. :)
Man...your really stuck on HTML/XHTML compliance aren't you? :P

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" :lol:

Just kidding on that one :)

Cheers

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 2:44 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
XHTML compliance is important for a variety of reasons - not least consistency.

Anyway, I read slashdot every so often. Digg is not far behind.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 3:22 am
by onion2k
Maugrim_The_Reaper wrote:XHTML compliance is important for a variety of reasons - not least consistency.
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's not very consistant .. and it breaks the HTTP standard.

:wink:

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 3:56 am
by timvw
Actually, i haven't found anything in the rfc describing http1.1 that says that the use of the text/html mime-type for xhtml breaks the http protocol... Where should i look?

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 4:00 am
by Grim...
I'm a diggite, and I post there, too.
Slashdot always seems late with the news.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 4:30 am
by shiznatix
slashdot is on my google homepage and i read it lots. i have only posted once when i actually had something good to input.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 4:55 am
by onion2k
I comment all the time on there .. and if karma is any measure, I'm ace!

http://slashdot.org/~onion2k/

Re: Slashdot

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:43 am
by Roja
Hockey wrote:Man...your really stuck on HTML/XHTML compliance aren't you? :P
Yes, I am extremely vigilent about compliance. Its not just important, its the bare minimum that anyone creating a webpage should do.
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 :)
I wouldn't be so confident about who "most of my visitors" are, and whether your site works for them.

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.

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 10:05 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
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/ ?
Try clicking the validation links at the bottom - it fails. ;) I know it's not yet compliant, the site was put up just yesterday and there are a few wrinkles to iron out over the next few days (when I have a moment). The doctype should actually be XHTML 1.0 Strict rather than XHTML 1.1 - will be when the final few edits put through.

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.