On Web Standards, is your document considered modern by browsers?
November 21st, 2006 by Dustin Brewer
Ok, so as many of as know there is a lot more then meets the eye when it comes to web page designing. You have to ensure that your web page is compatible in most of the browsers and that it works the way you want it to work on the end user’s side. So just making the web site look pretty is at best of the battle. It may be even less with ugly web sites like MySpace and YouTube being so popular, look at Google… simple, functional and to the point. These are all the most visited web sites on the Internet and they are close to the ugliest, but this isn’t about that. This is about XHTML validating your web sites and attempting to use an advertiser that complies.
I finally after a day and a half of working through all of the included pages in this web was able to get the web site W3C validated for XHTML 1.1. Which is an awesome thing to have, especially when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The search engines will favor the web sites that meet W3C standards because if they do, they are obviously web sites with good content because they adhere to the standards.The biggest problem I faced with becoming XHTML compliant was with some of my PHP where I didn’t allow for the proper space whenever I used the escape characters, which was my own fault but more difficult to back track and find then you would think. The best way of course is to do it right the first time and ensure that you are double and even triple checking that you are ending all of your tags with />. Otherwise you will have more troubles then you would like with getting your web site validating by the W3C.
Even if you don’t care about standards as much as everyone else, it is important to make sure that you make your web site standards compliant because it will ensure the best chances that your site will be viewed the same across all browsers. It helps to enable you to focus on more important things, like making sure that your content is updated regularly and that 16th redesign is set in place as soon as possible. Ok, maybe it is just me that likes to redesign web sites several times a month. Atleast I try and stick with the same color scheme, right? (link: the old site).
Of course most of the readers here know that standards are important even if Microsoft refuses to adhere to them. Another topic for another post, of course.
The issue that I came across was one of my advertisers is LinkShare and Apple, the only problem with that is the resource identifiers in the ad code was giving me 34 extra errors that were completely unnecessary. Is this a validation problem or is this a true problem with the code being used by Apple? Unfortunately it is a tough call on both sides. You have to of course include the various resource identifiers if I am to get paid and they are to track the results properly. So how do you get past this problem and avoid the W3C saying your web site has invalid markup?
I took the easy way out of course and chose to stick with Google AdSense instead of trying to bypass the W3C by hiding the code that the ad link uses. This of course isn’t always the option so it comes down to choosing standards or choosing advertising dollars from your sponsors. I of course am a designer and if I can’t ensure that the web site is meeting the design standards then I have no choice but to drop the advertiser.
Also be sure that you are assigning your document type. Without this assignment browsers will assume that you are running an older document and render it with an out dated markup engine. You can set your document type like so:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
At any rate, it is your responsibility as a designer to ensure that all of your web sites adhere to W3C standards and I suggest that you spend the countless hours or minutes ensuring that your web sites meet those standards by opening up all of the pages in DreamWeaver and using the W3C validator to find any errors that are in your web pages. Once you have found the errors search using DreamWeaver’s “Find and Replace” tool by finding the error and then replacing the invalid markup with the proper markup on all open documents. It should have a combo box that will allow you to choose that option and it will change all of the code throughout the documents (be sure you have it set on source code also).
Make sure when you are doing all of this that you are ensuring your search string for find is specific enough that it will only find the broken instances and not change areas of the web site that don’t need to be changed. You could easily cause more problems then necessary on the web site by choosing an ambiguous search string.
Once you have finished doing this and spending several hours changing your invalid markup you will be sick of standards and annoyed that you didn’t do it right the first time. Hopefully if you are smart you will ensure that next time you have all of the right syntaxes in the right places and all of your bloody />’s just so.
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