Re: HEADS UP: Website Overhaul

[Gary Thorpe <gathorpe79@xxxxxxxxx>]

David Cuthbert wrote:

> Oh, I definitely *should* care.  But, eh, engineering anything decent
> always includes a chapter on working around annoying constraints, so
> while I can sympathise with the problem, I just chalk it up to "just
> another imperfect system one can work around."  The annoyances of
> dealing with quirky hardware far outstrip the quirks of web browsers.
>
> Personally, I limit myself to simple tables and font styles.  Oh, I
> know about the advantages of CSS and such; but preprocessed HTML works
> much more reliably.


Using tables to format text is bad style and the ugliest but most 
popular hack on the internet. It doesn't "look" that fancy when you have 
to use a text browser (instead of the memory gobbling mozilla).

And if you seperate the style from the content, it will be easier to 
maintain: will it be easier to go through and edit a dozen documents 
that have particular fonts or edit the one stylesheet they all included 
for the same look and feel?

> Of late, I've even foregone much of that, limiting myself to Wikis and,
> when a Wiki isn't available, wrapping everything in <pre> tags (see
> http://www.kanga-da.org/ for example).


This is dirt simple to do in standard HTML and you won't have to rely 
and manually inserting tabs/spaces: the layout cannot be that crucial 
anyway.

> <shrug>  Maybe if I were a designer, instead of an engineer, in a
> different life.

> Dave
>
> James Frazer wrote:
>
> > You should care.  If more people cared about web designers using 
> > proper markup then browser designers (microsoft) would be more willing 
> > to make their browsers so that they don't suck.   Consequently the web 
> > designers could spend more time on content and less time fixing 
> > strange Internet Explorer rendering problems.
> >
> > Web designers use a number of 'sick' hacks to make things display 
> > properly on bad browsers - IE5/IE6 - there is a lot of overhead in 
> > dealing with strange IE problems.
> >
> > I think this time could be better spent on improving the overall 
> > content and features of the site.  Unfortunately users don't care 
> > about valid markup, nor do they care whether or not their browser 
> > impliments things properly.
> >
> > So yes, valid markup is important.
> >
> > --James
> >
> >
> > David Cuthbert wrote:
> >
> > > Eh.  As a user, I don't care whether the underlying site is valid XHTML,
> > > HTML, XML, SGML, PDF, EBCDIC, ..., just so long as it's visually
> > > appealing and I can read it.


I care when I choose/have to use alternate web browsers (like lynx or 
links) and cannot find any content.

> > > There are arguably 30-40 other concepts/sites which are equally
> > > compelling to link.