Re: Wired.com switched to a Web Standards compliant platform

"Holly" wrote:

>>> http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,55675,00.html
>
> I do not think that Tag Soup, including use of Fonts, absolute sizing,
> improper nesting, Headers for bolding. blockquoting for indents, and
> sizing is better than XHTML, (...)

I didn't say that. I noted that this page uses XHTML which is not
well-formed. Strictly speaking, this is not XHTML at all. When delivered
with a MIME type such as "application/xhtml+xml", XHTML user agent won't
render it but give you an error message.

This is worse than tag soup because HTML user agents have learned to deal
with invalid HTML.

>> Furthermore, the page lacks a proper character encoding declaration,
>> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"> isn't sufficient in XHTML.
>
> I see:
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

Of course that's what I'm referring to. This kind of character encoding
declaration *is* unsufficent in XHTML, see
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_9>.

>>   <a href="#" onclick="setActiveStyleSheet('', 1);return false;">
>
> Not sure where a problem with this one may be?

It doesn't work unless you enable JavaScript. Anyway, changing font sizes
can be easily performed within the user agent.

>>   <!-- BEGIN colMain -->
>>   <div id="colM">
>>   <div class="content">
>>   <div class="storyCap">
>>   <div class="pgTitle">
>
> Why not on these items?

They tried to separate content from style. The only child of the <div
id="colM"> element is the <div class="content"> element. So this element is
obviously superfluous and serves no function of the contents.

In <http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/wired-interview/>, Douglas
Bowman states that he wrote "nested tables 10 levels deep". Well, he's going
to make the same mistake again, this time with div's instead of tables.

  <div class="buffer"></div>

and

  <div class="clear">&nbsp;</div>

are other examples for markup without any meaning.

> Does this page work on Text only or Lynx view and make sense?

No. Did *you* try it? The "Skip directly to ... Content" link doesn't work,
and all these navigation and search bars at the top of the page really don't
make sense.

> Will an HTML doc with Tag Soup, degrade similarly for those cases, and
> allow as many user options?

I don't see any advantages at all.

-- 
<http://schneegans.de/>

Received on Monday, 14 October 2002 17:41:34 UTC