Saving Bandwidth Through Standards Compliance, Pt. 2 34
elijahao writes "In case part one of the interview with Mike Davidson of ESPN was interesting, the second part has been posted today."
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell
Redesigning (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Redesigning (Score:1)
Re:Redesigning (Score:1)
And don't try to tell them, that what they cooked up won't work. Even if it's just a small change in the layout to make it work in the template without resorting to voodoo, they get all worked up, as if you were personally insulting them.
What they don't know is that the real insults start as soon as they are off the phone
Re:Doesn't comply.. (Score:2)
Bad example (Score:4, Insightful)
One step forward, two steps back:
Actually, it's dead simple to do this with css 2. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't support a decent amount of css 2. Having said that, there are plenty of workarounds that work in Internet Explorer that aren't anywhere near as bad as this:
Excuse me? How on earth can they possibly know how high their home page is? That would depend on the size of the text, which depends on the font size I've picked to surf with.
What a fucking idiot. Validation is a mechanical syntax checking of the document. If your site doesn't validate, you aren't conforming to the rules of HTML/XHTML. It's more like saying he needs to be an American citizen to call himself an American.
Okay, let's take these things one at a time:
If you are closing an element (not tag), then it had better be open. If you open the element via a script, close it via a script, otherwise you are not following the specifications. The validator can't "figure it out" because it isn't compliant code. This guy seems to think that the use of client-side scripting somehow makes invalid documents magically valid.
It's a one-liner in most languages to fix this. If you are using a third-party ad server, then ask them to give you compliant code, it should be part of your contract to reduce business risk anyway.
Sounds like exactly the same thing. Ask your suppliers to give you code that follows the specifications.
Well existing user-agents treat empty alt attributes differently to missing alt attributes, and for good reason. It may mean little to him, because he doesn't use that software, others do. That is why you follow specifications, so all user-agents get a good deal.
Standards Compliant? (Score:3)
How can ESPN.com be touted as a site that is "saving bandwidth through standards compliance" when they're not standards compliant? It's possible to do all the absolute-positioning and other CSS tricks without making the site completely standards non-compliant.
I think the intentions are noble (encouraging upgrades to compliant browsers, reducing page weight with less code), but it seems like somebody didn't finish the job. That's fine if that's what
Re:Standards Compliant? (Score:1)
What's rendered so far doesn't look so hot.
I applaude the effort, but fixed pixels is never a good solution. The whole idea behind standards compliance is seperating content from presentation. The side effect is that you don't have absolute control over the presentation as an author. People just need to get over it. If they want absolute control ov
Re:Bad example (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bad example (Score:2)
I'd imagine the reason it goes to espn.go.com is the same reason all C|Net sites go to
Re:Bad example (Score:2)
I'm running 1.0.1.
Crank your resolution up to 1600x1200 and set the font to a comfortable size: the site disintegrates into unusability. Leave the original fonts alone and the characters are 8 pixels tall--small enough to draw 120 lines of text on the screen--which is hideously painfully small.
ESPN.com is simply an amateurish disaster, design
Re:Bad example (Score:2)
I wouldn't be that harsh...though they aren't a good example of standards compliance. On a practical note, even on a 1280x1024 with Mozilla 1.3 the text chop/overlap problem is obvious. Just increase the font once or twice and look at the menus.
BTW...what's the point using a fixed width page? Why not use variable width columns?
Re:Bad example (Score:1)
A 12pt font should be the same size across all screens and all resolutions.
If you vid. card's drivers don't come with the ability to change the DPI setting, then it's time to get a better vid. card (or possibly OS). Shoot, even my ancient ATI Rage 128 Pro drivers let me do this.
At home I have a 20" IBM P202 monitor running off an ATI Rage 128 Pro card at 1280x1024 and the fonts are set at standard 12pt -- I just cranked the DPI up to
Re:Bad example (Score:2)
The DPI setting on XFree86 is erratic anyway, but that's beside the point.
Relax, man (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, this guy is clearly not a "fucking idiot." He simply believes in practical solutions, and is not interested in abstract validation. I am a bit more to your side (I find, for instance, the opening of tags in javascript to be a nightmare maintanance idea), but I respect his approach. All of us know the difficulty of turning a Photoshop document from a designer used to print publishing, and turning it into a compliant web page.
Calm down. He's on your team. Don't be so absolute.
& in HTML (Score:2)
There's no need to bother with the third-party ad server. Just replace & with & in the href and src attribute values as you would anyw
Re:Bad example (Score:2)
Which was what? That there is a business case for complying with published specifications? I think it's completely appropriate to point out that you can't promote "web standards" without actually conforming to them.
Why? That website is not the subject of a case-study, it's just a place to stick a few files from time
Annoying! *groan* (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Annoying! *groan* (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, while the specific dot version may only be two years old, I believe the NS4 series was released in the '97-'98 timeframe, making the codebase in the area of 5-6 years old! That's half the age of the web!
And no, it's not hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4. It is hard to code a page that will look correct and good, and do so in the most recent browsers, and use proper a
Re:Annoying! *groan* (Score:1)
XHTML is 3 years old.
And neither standard appeared overnight.CSS 1 is 7 years old.
Re:Annoying! *groan* (Score:2)
So, your pages aren't viewable in Lynx 100% of the time then, is what you're saying.
Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4.
Yes it is - at least, as someone else pointed out, to have it be visually normal in modern browsers. No, NS4.7 isn't two years old.
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/brows e rs
NS
i'll compliant your standards! (Score:1)
This is the reason that my website [sillytech.com] does NOT validate [w3.org].
I wanted to validate. I tried to validate. But the ampersands screwed me.
Re:i'll compliant your standards! (Score:1)
Re:i'll compliant your standards! (Score:1)
What's the problem with &'s in URLs?
& in HTML (Score:3, Informative)
Re:i'll compliant your standards! (Score:2)
BTW, some web application libraries (such as Perl's CGI.pm) are moving to a newer style of URL that uses semicolons rather than ampersand to separate the parameters.
Arrogant and Clueless (Score:2, Interesting)
The absolute positioning trick destroys the layout in Galeon (I've got the minimum font size set to 22 for the sake of my sanity). The left hand column overlaps the centre column (although gecko should arguably character-wrap to prevent that), and some of the text in the boxes on the right is missing because it doesn't fit. And the only reason the line spacing isn't far to small is because I've overridden it in my user stylesheet to fix similarly brain-damaged sites. The "lite" site isn't much better.
To be
Nice effort but... (Score:1)
http://www.froggy.com.au/mike.skinner/Mike Skinner - Resume.htm
If I am building a site for a target browser and version (MSIE 6 on an intranet, etc), I will build to XHTML Strict, just to keep my brain active. XHTML Strict is a pain in the butt, some things are virtually impossible to do (or workarounds are not elegant).
Otherwise I like to