Re: Incorrect Website Coding -- A Bit Of A Grump

In article <0001HW.C588B36E00055A66B01AD9AF@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
TaliesinSoft <taliesinsoft@xxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 6 Jan 2009 02:51:35 -0600, Sander Tekelenburg wrote (in article
<user-5486E2.09513506012009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

In article <NOwebmasterSPAM-14A669.15551806012009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Eric Lindsay <NOwebmasterSPAM@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

You are surprised about invalid pages when the Opera MAMA survey of web
sites showed less than 5% were valid ... and this was a great advance
compared to earlier surveys? Minor aside, iWeb sites got over 80% valid.

Which shows how little meaning 'valid HTML' has. iWeb, at least last time
I looked, produces mostly span and div elements. So yes, its output tends
to be syntactically valid and thus much better than most other authoring
tools. But it produces mostly meaningless HTML -- plenty of room for
improvement still.

I just now subjected a half dozen websites produced with Freeway, a WYSIWYG
website development tool, and all of them passed W3C validation. These
websites were randomly picked from
<http://www.softpress.com/featuredhomepage.php>, a page on the Freeway
website that features websites produced with Freeway.

It is really excellent that Freeway produces valid web pages (the random
ones I checked also validated). Just being valid is rare.

Now, take one of these sites with lots of text in it. Imagine that, like
me, you are getting old and your eyesight is not as good as it once was.
Either set your browser to not allow fonts less than (pick your own font
size here) or else just make the text larger in your browser.

Watch the web page fall apart and become unreadable because of text
overlapping.

Note that the Freeway sites all seem to be in Transitional HTML, which
is intended for updating existing web sites, not for writing new web
sites. That Doctype puts web browsers into Quirks mode (imitate lots of
the old bugs in ancient browsers). If you read the browser developer's
blogs, you may notice that all the advances in browsers are going into
Standards mode. To make use of Standards mode, you need to write your
new web pages as HTML Strict.

Does Freeway allow this?

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com
.

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