OT: HTML (WAS: MF having issues?)


"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:46o0i6FbssfnU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Today I was grabbed by an enthusiastic person in my workplace who had used SharePoint to build an Intranet site. It looks totally professional and he is rightly proud of it. It is the sort of thing we couldn't even dream of in 1995. Even though he is only serving up static HTML pages and has no idea how they work or the fine points of the language, he has a very professional looking site that he built in about an hour. It is shared on the intranet and will be very useful for teams to share information and news. He is thrilled and the technology has empowered him. (I looked at some of the code and it is like what happens when you write HTML in MS Word... Horrific! but who cares? It does what he wants and he did it easily without any special knowledge.)

This is a minor gripe of mine, so feel free to ignore this post if the issue of standards-conformance and HTML does not interest you.

Bad HTML versus good HTML might be subjective, but I dislike invalid (non-standard conforming) HTML.

From http://www.webstandards.org/about/
<quote>
The Problem

Though leading browser makers have been involved in the creation of web standards since W3C was formed, for many years compliance was observed in the breach. By releasing browsers that failed to uniformly support standards, manufacturers needlessly fragmented the Web, injuring designers, developers, users, and businesses alike.

Lack of uniform support for W3C standards left consumers frustrated: when using the “wrong” browser, many could not view content or perform desired transactions. Among those most frequently hurt were people with disabilities or special needs.

Quandaries and Costs

At the same time, lack of uniform support for W3C standards left designers, developers and site owners in a terrible quandary: could they afford to implement multiple versions of every web page in order to accommodate incompatible browsers? If not, which browsers should they neglect, and how many millions of potential visitors were they willing to turn away? Either way, the cost was too high. It still is.
</quote>

It is not enough for the website to simply "look okay" on any one particular browser; the HTML should be structurally correct, and the tags used for their semantics, rather than how they render in one particular browser. The <em> tag, for example, stands for "emphasis", and using it to render text in italics because that's how your particular browser visually renders emphasis is incorrect.

For example, perhaps you have a style guide which says quotation attributions should be displayed in italics. You should note write the HTML as:

"Bla bla bla" - <em>some guy</em>

One reason is that a different browser might not render them as italics; another reason is that browsers for the visually impaired will interpret the HTML to mean that "some guy" should be spoken with emphasis, clearly giving the complete wrong effect to those users.

From
http://www.law.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/View&c=LawArticle&cid=1032128683422&t=LawArticleTech
<quote>
When Robert Gumson logs on to the Internet, he uses a software program that converts Web site content into speech. But when he logged on to Southwest Airlines' Web site to make a reservation, Gumson, who is blind, found that the site was incompatible with his screen-reader program.

So Gumson and a Miami Beach, Fla.-based disability rights group, Access Now, filed lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Miami in June and July against Dallas-based Southwest and Dallas-based American Airlines under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
</quote>

- Oliver

.

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