Comments on: W3C Concepts and Fixes: Separating Design from Content and Ensuring Standards Compliance

By: Posts about CSS as of March 13, 2009 | XHTML and CSS

Posts about CSS as of March 13, 2009 | XHTML and CSS — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:30:09 +0000

[...] research world into a media used for a wide sets of purposes including marketing and advertising W3C Concepts and Fixes: Separating Design from Content and Ensuring Standards Compliance Filed Under… – musingsforadarkenedroom.com 03/10/2009 (The following is a guest post from Brian Harnish)One of [...]

By: Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:54:14 +0000

@ShirleyTipsy- Thank you!

@Mike – Yup…those cookies sure look good. You should make some and bring them by for all us marketing people!

By: John Jones

John Jones — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:53:44 +0000

@Shirley Tipsy

Cookies? I thought those were cakes! Either way, I agree, they look tasty.

By: Shirley Tipsy

Shirley Tipsy — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:32:05 +0000

Great post Brian! I’m interested to see how your little experiment plays out!

P.S. Mikey, you need to make me some of those cookies in the pic. Yummy.

By: John Jones

John Jones — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:31:19 +0000

@Brian,

Frankly I use Alt with my websites because the majority of web surfers out their still use one version of IE or another. Additionally I frequently utilize one editor or another and even they are still built to use ‘Alt’.

You might call this laziness, stubbornness or maybe a little of both and I’d probably agree with you but just like it is your prerogative to obsess over compliance issues, it is my prerogative to be as compliant as possible without obsessing and spend more of my time on things that matter most to me like the other 200 or so factors for good rankings.

@Mike are you enjoying this banter back and fourth? How’s the traffic for this post? Planning on disabling comments on this post yet?

By: Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:22:50 +0000

@John – True. However, there IS the issue of alt vs. title text. The title tag is W3C valid, AND it shows up on all browsers. Alt text doesn’t…and you can forget about it showing up on Firefox. I wouldn’t call that a slight affect as a result of non compliance.

Just had to throw that out there. Hehe.

By: John Jones

John Jones — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:10:28 +0000

@Brian I’ve definitely had dealings with multiple web designers and even programmers who have to output data from databases. I almost always hear the, “IE6? Oh yeah, I’ll fix that. Though you should really update to IE 7 or better yet use Firefox.”

My response to that would be, “When everyone else uses the exact same browsers with the exact same settings then I might consider it but until then this needs to work on as much as possible.”

I’m not against W3C compliance, I’m simply not a perfectionist when it comes to it and certain things that might show up as an issue with their validator may not have the slightest affect to anyone on any platform.

I’d definitely be up for a challenge by the way. Mike, Jeremy and maybe Audrey can set the rules, timeline & keyword(s).

Oh how much joy and amusement this has brought to me since yesterday both at home and in the office. Fun times!

By: Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:07:57 +0000

Jeremy – Yup…which is why I, and many designers/developers abhor having to write specialty code FOR IE6 because of its lameness when it comes to rendering code. Argh. BTW, by default W3C IS supposed to be user friendly. It’s designed to be a standard that works across all user agents and promotes user friendliness/usability for web sites across all platforms, not just a few.

I’d also like to provide an example, if you will. It is, however, a table-based layout, but uses very minimal markup and still passes W3C validation in their validator. The homepage for worldofwebdesign.info. I still haven’t gotten to the rest of the interior pages to correct some coding errors and SEOing them. Argh.

By: Brian Harnish

Brian Harnish — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:57:54 +0000

John – I would certainly be up to the challenge sir! What do you think Mike?

Jeremy – You could be a judge for this as well. What do you think?

By: Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:23:03 +0000

All browsers don’t follow w3c, and so by default you have to add extra code for IE 6 to render properly. W3c is an unattainable goal, because it’s NOT user friendly, because the users are all on browsers that interpret code differently!