Don’t bother with web standards!

Quite the statement huh? No, I’m not saying it, but Microsoft essentially are.

According to The Register’s article ‘Microsoft breaks IE8 interoperability promise‘, Microsoft intend on displaying a broken page icon next to all web pages that are standards compliant.

What does this say to your average Joe Blogg user? Standards = wrong. At least that’s the way I see it. And of course some lots of those users will probably want to design their own web sites. Do you think they will design to standards now? I think not!

Your Choice of CSS Book?

If you could only choose one CSS book for your shelf or library, which one would it be and why?

Below is some reference material to help aid in your decision :)

Web Standards & Doctypes?

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know enough about web standards. I’ve been designing web sites for several years and have known about web standards for only the last few years. In order to learn as much as possible about web standards I now read lots of Web Design blogs. Thankfully I’m learning more and more from those blogs. There’s always plenty of interesting posts on web standards, accessibility, usability, and the likes.

But what I don’t get is why there is the need for so many Doctypes. Can someone please explain it to me?

With all the talk about this site and that site conforming to Web Standards and this site and that site not conforming to web standards, why isn’t there anyone trying to simplify the situation?

Why isn’t there only two doctypes? One for standard compliant sites and one for non-compliant sites. In fact, why isn’t there only one doctype – a standard compliant one?

Why do we need three doctypes just for HTML 4.01, and three more for XHTML 1.0? What’s the rational behind this? I have honestly no idea, but hope that someone will impart their wisdom upon me and make me all the wiser :)

Web Design Point Redesigned

Web Design Point (a site for web design articles) has been redesigned to comply with web standards (XHTML 1.0 Transitional). The layout is based on Layout 14 from the Layout Gala, with some minor tweaks to get the desired result.

The design has been in place for quite a while now, but I forgot to blog about it (coupled with the fact that I’ve had PC problems for about 8 weeks – sorted now!). The site in itself is still very young, and lots of articles still need to be added, so if you are interested in writing for Web Design Point please get in contact!

I’m looking forward to an influx of emails now, y’hear :D

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics

In December 2005 we did an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents, extracting information about popular class names, elements, attributes, and related metadata.

Some interesting things I picked up from the study are:

  • A whole slew of people are specifying the xml:lang attribute, which will have absolutely no effect (no HTML processor will look at that attribute; it’s an XML attribute).
  • Of the top twenty most-used attributes on body, fourteen are purely presentational.
  • The br element is a simple one, yet used on so many pages that it is the 8th most-used element. It is used more than the p element. There are very few legitimate semantic places to use this element (addresses and poems are the canonical examples), which means that most uses are probably presentational.
  • In our data sample there were twice as many pages that used the table element but didn’t use the td element
  • The script element was used on roughly half the pages we checked.

Google Code: Web Authoring Statistics