Just as a short follow-up to Why XHTML?, I thought I’d give you some read-worthy links to posts about it, and also bring up companies’ attitude towards it.
What I wonder is if companies really care about the level and quality of interface code they deliver, no matter if it’s HTML or XHTML.
As long as it doesn’t break miserably, it doesn’t matter. I used the Blogger service before swithcing to WordPress, and Blogger were always very quick to answer support mails, and during outages they seemed to work hard and efficiently to fix it.
With that said, I got a little saddened by something they wrote in a reply to my question about that the comment interface didn’t generate valid XHTML. The thing is, their templates (at least the ones I used) were coded using XHTML 1.0 Strict, so naturally I wanted my pages containing comments to be well-formed too.
Their reply:
However, unless it
is actually breaking functionality somewhere in Blogger or causing true
accessibility issues, it will likely be treated with a low-priority.
I think this symbolizes the general attitude of many companies: if it doesn’t break, it isn’t really that important if it is correct.
Let’s fall back on forgiving web browsers instead. But this might turn into a problem if browsers in the future will demand correct code to render it correctly.
What do you think? Are the companies right when it comes to this prioritizing, or is this exactly the attitude that holds the web back from evolving?
So finally I have my own domain! A big thank you to Henrik Box at southside.se who has been hosting my different projects during a long time!
This move will, except for an easier domain name, mean enchanced stability and functionality. I’ve left Blogger and started using WordPress. Blogger was a bit shaky and couldn’t offer all of the functionality that I was looking for, so a switch of blogging tool was due.
Search functionality is available in the sidebar to the right and all posts are categorized. I guess many of them will be labeled General, but still I hope it will distinguish certain posts from the rest, e.g. posts about XHTML.
The new commenting system requires of you to enter your e-mail adress, however it’s just for my sake and will not be publicly displayed nor given out to anyone.
It’s stability is a vast improvement from the previous one, and the color coding will hopefully make it more easy on the eye to read.
Given the discussion in Why XHTML?, this page is using content negotiation, which means that it serves XHTML 1.0 Strict as application/xhtml+xml to those web browsers who are capable of handling that, and HTML 4.01 Strict to those who aren’t.
Please let me know what you think about the new design, functionality and, of course, the content. If you find anything that doesn’t work, please let me know.
Since it consists of already existing teqhniques, it’s just
a matter of branding. I think it’s good that it gets hyped and has
gotten a new name to market. Used the correct way and during suitable
circumstances, it can certainly enhance the user experience.
I
do think it is an interesting way of doing it, and I hope the hype
makes it easier to persuade/convince project managers to allow its
usage in appropriate web sites. What do you think?
PS. Have a nice weekend, I’ll write more on Monday. DS.
During my day-to-day work as a developer, I go through a
number of moods (maybe more moods than what’s good for me), and I
thought I’d explain them with references to songs:
My day kind of starts with I hurt myself today (and some days end with it as well):
“I hurt myself today To see if I still feel I focus on the pain The only thing that’s real”
As I’ve mentioned before, in my previous company we worked with offshore developing located in Serbia. Given the fact that we were sitting in different countries, different levels of knowledge of the English language, different skills and such, sometimes we didn’t work seamlessy together.
The phrase in the heading came from one of the system developers in Serbia, when he had (less knowingly) changed my interface code, followed up by the jokingly said comment “I improve design”.
Needless to say, in my eyes, it wasn’t improved (however, if you’re reading this, Aleks, no hard feelings from my side. It was an entertaining ride :-)).
I tend to be very though when it comes to the structure of my code, which leads me to how to set up the structure of one’s CSS file(s).
Earlier on, I used to order my CSS in the order things were rendered in the page. However, I soon realized that with additions and changes all the time, fixes and so on, this wasn’t really useful as soon as I got to build bigger web sites.
So nowadays, I structure my CSS this way:
First, tag-specific CSS:
a{
color:#FFF;
}
body{
margin:0px;
}
Then ID-specific CSS, in alphabetical order where the tag name is the separator:
div#containerDiv{
width:800px;
margin:20px auto;
}
img#artImg{
border:0px;
}
img#userImg{
margin-left:20px;
}
Followed by class-specific CSS for specific tags, in alphabetical order where the tag name is the separator:
div.contentDiv{
width:400px;
background:#F00;
}
img.linkArrowImg{
float:right;
}
And finally class-specific CSS for any kind of tag, in alphabetical order where the tag name is the separator:
My blog peaked yesterday, with roughly 1100 unique visitors. It may or may not sound a lot to you, but it’s an amount of visitors that I’m very happy with (especially since I’ve only blogged for about a month).
So thank you everyone for visiting, commenting and linking to my web site!
Hopefully I’ll keep on writing about things that interest you and that makes you think it’s worth coming back here again.
PS. Kudos to one of my colleagues that used his brand new PSP through W-LAN to navigate to and read my blog! DS.
So, just to spice up the rumour about a Google/Firefox web browser: Google has introduced functionality that will enhance searching
with Firefox and Mozilla browsers. Is this just a result of a good
collaboration of the two, or that they unite in their struggle against
Microsoft? Or is it maybe some preparation before an upcoming launch of
a special Google browser, based on Firefox with lots of extra Google
functionality.
For obvious reasons, people speculate what Google’s and Firefox secret fling is.
This is a well-discussed and very important topic. Personally, presently I write XHTML for my web interface code, but lately I’ve started to stagger in my standpoint. For normal general web page design, what’s the gain? If you don’t extend the code with namespaces, use MathML, have your own DTDs and so on, why would you want to use XHTML?
Many people answer that question with: “It makes me write leaner code, code that has to validate and be more semantic correct”. Martin wrote a post recently why he uses XHTML (unfortunately, it’s in Swedish).
But I don’t agree with the argument that it has to be XHTML to achieve that particular goal. I think it’s more of a developer standpoint than using XHTML. If you’re really dedicated to what you do, you use the correct tags for the correct purposes (H1 for headings etc), you write as lean and minimal code as possible and you close all optional tags like LI, P and so on. Basically, you can live up to that with using the HTML 4 Strict Doctype, and separating content (HTML) from layout/look (CSS) and interactivity (JavaScript).
Another reason people use it is that they might think it makes them better programmers, that they code ‘the real deal’. It might also be as a selling point, for the project manager or his/her like, to tell the customer that: “Yes, we know what we do, we code XHTML”. But, unfortunately, very few do it all the way. As mentioned in Anne‘s Quick quide to XHTML about Evan Goer’s test, 89% of the web sites tested didn’t validate and 99% used the incorrect MIME type!
Which leads to the MIME type issue. In a very talked-about piece, Ian Hickson writes that if you use XHTML it should be delivered as application/xhtml+xml (which, surprise, Internet Explorer doesn’t support) to the web browser, otherwise it will be perceived as ‘tag soup’ (however, not everyone agrees that it should be called ‘tag soup’). But what has happened is that people have gone to such length that they use something called content negotiation, which basically boils down to serving XHTML as application/xhtml+xml to those web browsers who support it, and HTML 4 as text/html to those who don’t.
When you deliver XHTML as application/xhtml+xml to a browser that supports it, it won’t even render the page if it’s incorrect, but instead throw an error. Generally, I think this is a good thing that forces the developer to write correct code. Alas, speaking from my point of view, working in projects where Content Management Systems don’t deliver correct XHTML, where the .NET Framework doesn’t deliver correct XHTML etc, serving it as application/xhtml+xml is impossible for me.
Yes, Content Management System manufacturers are getting more aware of this, ASP.NET 2.0 is supposed to deliver XHTML the way it should be delivered, but it’s still a long way ahead in the future. So what are my (and many other developers’) options? To deliver XHTML that doesn’t validate (although the errors might be minor/make no difference to how it will be rendered) as text/html, or should we deliver plain old HTML?
One point is also that this will not affect the end users, as long as you write valid code in its context, be it XHTML or HTML. An interesting sidenote to this is that MSN Search serves valid XHTML 1.0 Strict which validates, while Google serves a non-Doctype page which generates 242 errors…
Conclusively, to go back to my initial question: why use XHTML if I only use it for standard HTML? Why go through the hassle if I don’t use any of the XHTML-specific features? Anne brought up an interesting thing from Mozilla’s Web Author FAQ about how to serve HTML (and the thing that Mozilla, nor any other browser, loads XHTML incrementally, as opposed to HTML), and he comes to the conclusion that one should switch to HTML.
Also, Tommy made the statement a couple of weeks ago that XHTML Is Dead.
And these are two very talented persons that just don’t believe in XHTML anymore, and that saddens me and makes me think: Are they right? Should I go back to writing HTML?
PS. Let me know what you think! Is XHTML or HTML the way to go? Write a comment and I’ll send you an invitation to use Google’s Gmail service (2 GB inbox(!), POP3 access etc). DS.
Regarding the problem the movie industry faces with more and
more people having broadband internet access, learning to download
movies etc, it seems like they have finally reacted in the right way. They want to create the movie equivalent of Apple‘s iTunes.
Personally,
I don’t think the witch hunt for people that download movies (or music,
for that matter) is the way to go. They gravely underestimate the sheer
amount and power of the downloading community. I don’t think they’ll
ever be able to eliminate illegal downloading that way, all they gain
is disrespect and hate for their actions that are overly tainted with
greed.
Of course they want to make money, of course they don’t
like when people download their movies without paying for it. Totally
understandable. But I think the only way for them to “win the
battle” or at least turn it around a bit, is to offer really good
downloading services for a really good price. And given the money they save on distribution, staff costs etc they will still make money, trust me.
In these times of information overload, RSS
is the only alternative for me to stay on top of things. It gives me
the opportunity to read information from about twice as many places as
navigating to the web sites. The possibility to just skim through
headlines and short descriptions really helps me find what I really
should read, as opposed to wasting time seeing banners, trying to
understand 30 web sites navigation structure etc.
So what does
RSS stand for? The mostly used definition is Really Simple Syndication
(which is also the definition for it in RSS 2.x), but for the format
RSS 0.91 it stands for Rich Site Summary and for RSS 1.0 it stands for
RDF Site Summary.
First of all, most (if not all) blogs have some kind of RSS feed (as does mine),
to make it easy for returning readers to see if anything has been
updated or if today’s/this week’s topic seems interesting enough to
read, and so on. But nowadays most news sites and other web sites
use it as well, because it offers a good way to reach out to more
visitors and also giving them another option.
Personally, I use Sage,
which is an extension to Firefox, to able to, in an easy and fast
manner, go through the updates in the RSS feeds I follow. Just press
alt+s and you get it as a sidebar, without interrupting your general browsing.
So how do I know if a web site has a RSS feed? Most of the web sites offering RSS feeds have an icon, similar to this: , and in Firefox you get an orange icon in the bottom right corner, indicating that a feed is available.
As
a developer, you can also make the feed available by inserting a link
tag in your first page/all of your pages, like this example for the
Sage project site:
wrote a 
, and in Firefox you get an orange icon in the bottom right corner, indicating that a feed is available.