Re: Markup Challenge: aaronsw.com

Yay! I get to be a contestant on The Hixie Challenge. This is so much 
fun. It is with great trepidation that I challenge the Word of The 
Great Hixie, but here goes...

> ".com" was supposed to be for companies, and this site is not a 
> commercial site.
Ooh, that's a good one! Luckily for me RFC 1591 is only informative, 
not standards-track, so I don't need to meet this requirement.

> The HTML files contain no encoding information
Did you look at the headers? They're sent as:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

> As with Mark's <div id="logo">, this element appears to be there 
> purely for stylistic reasons and doesn't seem to add anything to the 
> structore of the document. As such, it should be removed.
I consider <span> and <div> as base classes, to be subclassed (using 
class="...") when no more specific class will do. (If we had a decent 
format, we could use namespaces instead.)

Using well-known-classes for the banner allows tools like screen 
readers to skip over it. I think this is important information to 
provide.

> <div class="content"><div id="main">
> At least one of those <div>s is redundant, if not both.
content indicates the portion of the document that is relatively unique 
(not part of the banner/head or the footer). I can imagine screen 
readers and other tools that might want to jump straight to the 
content. Meanwhile, id="main" separates the recent weblog entries from 
the sidebar. Similarly, I see important structural uses for these.

> A much better alternate text would be [...]
Added (with some corrections).

> <table class="invisible">
> default background colour
> <h2 class="title">
> First, why a <div>? This is a paragraph, not a section.
> Next, the <br> element.
> the caption [...] should be marked up using a <cite> element.
> class="calendarhead"
> Lists that don't use list markup
>  In any case, the copyright notice in the footer should be in a 
> paragraph.
All fixed.

> The image is purely decorative as far as I can tell: if I was reading 
> this story to someone, the image would not convey any additional 
> information.
Huh? Did you read the title or the last paragraph? 
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000721

> In the "What I'm Doing" section
Removed.

> alt="spread the dot"
Changed to alt="&#x2022;" - BULLET. A bullet is a type of dot, so I 
think I'm OK.

> According to Dan Conolly, the <address> element is a general footer 
> element
It's "Connolly". No, that's what I said[1]. Dan Connolly corrected me, 
saying "I take the <address> tag to provide a signature for the page; 
signatures usually include dates"[2]. I don't think signatures usually 
include copyright notices.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/2001MayJun/0066
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/2001MayJun/0068

I await my fate,
-- 
Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com]

Received on Sunday, 24 November 2002 16:59:56 UTC