Converting to standards... (sort of)

Hey all,

    This was the one group where I thought this would be of interest. 
I recently noticed on a weblog that KPMG.ca as well as KPMG.com 
completely shatters in Gecko-based browsers, and it turned out it was 
because the site was handing over NN4.x code to Gecko.  So, in a fit 
of something that induced initiative, I grabbed local copies of 
KPMG.com's main page and Javascript files, and hacked at their 
scripts until they used the W3C DOM enough to work in both Gecko and 
IE.  It's available at <http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/fixed/kpmg/>.
    Note that it's not a full standards makeover-- the markup is still 
crawling with FONT tags, probably has poor element nesting, and uses 
a ton of scripting to even assemble the page.  And I suspect some of 
the DOM scripting isn't W3C DOM, but based on shortcuts that happen 
to work in both IE and Gecko.  I'm not really a DOM or a Javascript 
expert, so I did what I could and, with help, was lucky I got that 
far.  I freely admit that what I did was a hack job on a hack job, 
and could no doubt be improved upon.  Since it was done as a personal 
gratis project, I was willing to give up only so much of my Saturday 
afternoon to it.
    Anyway, I'm sharing all this with you for two reasons.  One is 
that if other people want to fix things up further, please be my 
guest.  I'd love to see it based solely on the W3C DOM and use 
validating, non-FONT HTML, and if that got it working in Opera and 
other browsers, so much the better.  (I have no idea if Opera's DOM 
support can deal with the site's intended effects or not.)
    The other reason is to propose that it might be worthwhile for the 
group to do this on occasion to high-profile sites that are based on 
outdated development methods, but could work as well-- if not 
better-- when based on standards.  Doing this for a major site isn't 
easy, of course, but by sharing the conversion efforts, they'd be 
easier to accomplish.  Sadly, I can't volunteer to be a coordinator 
for such projects, as I'm already swamped.  I simply wish to put the 
idea in front of the list members to see what you all think.

--
Eric A. Meyer  (eric@meyerweb.com)  http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/
Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide,"
  "Eric Meyer on CSS," "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference," and more
   http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/

Received on Sunday, 22 September 2002 23:06:51 UTC