Website Development

Trojan

Opera wrote:

MAMA ran every single URL it analyzed through the W3C validator; the validator's SOAP response contains a binary true/false result of the validation. A "true" value is considered a successful validation.

MAMA found that 145,009 out of 3,509,180 URLs passed validation—only 4.13%!. Even though this ratio shows great improvement over the results of previous validation studies (see the table below), this is a very worrying figure, which shows that there is a lot of Web standards education still to be done to increase these levels. The table below shows the trend of improvement between MAMA and previous studies.

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-key-findings/

The Mighty Ken

Trojan wrote: »

Storm in a teacup.

I concur.

charybdis

The Mighty Ken wrote: »

I concur.

As do I, but I done writed this anyway, because I'm kind of a dick, and a hypocrite.

musician wrote: »

I'm saying the idea of using divs was brought to peoples notice in most cases by standards advocates. Of course plenty of designers knew of them before then but I'm NOT making a point about every designer out there. I'm saying if some people out there are using them inappropriately it may be because they misunderstood what they were reading. I am not writing off the web standards movement as a bad thing at all. I feel as I'm being attacked for knocking web standards when I am not doing that. I simply noticed divs used badly in a link someone posted and pointed out that I see this kind of thing quite often and it may be because someone didn't grasp the idea of standards and divs fully.

You have to appreciate that you seem to be laying the blame for the lack of a semantic web at the foot of the web standards movement for their inability to force those who misuse their teachings to do so semantically.

musician wrote: »

You are right. Every piece of literature I have read on standards did not talk about, give any examples or recommend using divs for layout instead of tables.

Well, you see, that's actually not what I said. Besides, I think they actually would've advocated CSS for layout and divs for markup.

musician wrote: »

Nobody took this learning and misused it in any way, shape or form. Sites that we see today with divs used inappropriately happened by accident. Not one person missed the point of semantics.

Oh! I see! He's using sarcasm, a tactic previously unemployed on the internet.

musician wrote: »

My whole point was an attack on every single designer who applies web standards because they all do it wrong and was not an attempt to point out how some people have misunderstood along the way and might benefit from a reminder of semantics.

...

musician wrote: »

Again I agree with you and regret the many times I have stated here that divs are never correct and always wrong semantically.

Exactly I've been trying to show how xhtml is nothing but a bad thing all along. Fair cop. In another life I was discussing how some designers might lose sight of semantics if they don't understand things properly. Not here though.

...

musician wrote: »

Case closed. Lets never discuss content negotiation, parsing content as xml for the efficiency benefits, our xhtml breaking when it finally does deliver it in an xml content type because we were getting away with things like document.write in javascript, not having the xml declaration at the beginning of the document, not using namespace based dom script and so on. Lets embrace standards, validate it with w3c and never ask questions about it ever again.

...

Well actually in that last bit you raise some interesting points, none of which actually matter if the content is served as text/html, even if it's XHMTL, which we have already established is not incorrect.

Trojan wrote: »

My bet is you take production code from musician, charybdis and Almighty Ken, you'll see some pretty decent semantic, standards based code.

I don't doubt musician's ability to write good code, but when he decides to make unsubstantiated comments about towers that I consider important, ivory as they may be, I think it's not unreasonable to ask for clarification or for him to qualify his arguments.

Trojan wrote: »

Care to share a sample guys?

Yes, let us all compare the relative size of our genitals, and perhaps the various metrics of our ability to urinate.

The following two paragraphs are important, the rest are not.

I'm not so much arguing with you as I am trying to understand why you seem consider the web standards movement (and XHTML) as being harmful because some people have misused some of the methods they advocate (divs) in preference to less semantic methods that are also misused (tables). I also don't understand your issues with the Transitional DTDs, which you have professed the existence of yet failed to elucidate elsewhere also: http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055386333

I really think we're all on the same page here but we are at odd as out arguments have suffered from imprecise language (ironically) and thus lack cogency and have no functional existence other than that they are adversarial. Unless we start discussing specific issues this tangent is meaningless.

The Mighty Ken

Let's all just wait for HTML 5 to become a standard (say around 2099) and we can stop talking about div's as a stop gap solution and start discussing semantics properly again without having to wave our big, knowledgeable willys around.

mewso

O.k. well I'm a bit blue in the face saying I am not laying the blame of poor semantics at the foot of the standards movement only. I have tried to say it can be a symptom. I give up. If we can't discuss these issues without being accused of attacking standards whats the point?

I see nothing wrong with acknowledging the pitfalls some people who don't fully understand what they are embracing may land upon. We can have a discussion on how good web standards are or how important they are or why people should be embracing them and I'll agree with you all day long. If you think I was saying this was all because of web standards then I apologise for my poor choice of words.

As to the transitional thing you are correct in that I didn't explain myself and I should have. I would be willing to bet (lets have another barny over this) that a large percentage of xhtml web pages use the transitional doctype. If I was to create a new web page right now and planned it to be xhtml then I should use the strict doctype (or I would contend that one should). I think the primary aim of the transitional doctype was to accomodate designers who were moving old html pages to xhtml and didn't want to declare them as fully xhtml until they were certain they were and the transitional doctype allowed for some non-standard elements iirc. Again I'll probably be accused of some kind of knocking of standards or some such but I would guess an awful lot of people are using the transitional doctype inappropriately and I think they should consider if their pages (after several years of standards) should now be declared as strict. It was intended to be exactly what it was named, transitional, and I don't think people are making the transition as it were.

mewso

Trojan wrote: »

Storm in a teacup. If you take hypotheticals it's easy to get knickers in a twist.

My bet is you take production code from musician, charybdis and Almighty Ken, you'll see some pretty decent semantic, standards based code.

A good argument is often a good discussion and the odd misconstruing of words aside I thoroughly enjoy it. You probably wouldn't get production code from the 3 of us anyway. We'd be too busy arguing about it
More discussion on semantics would be great as I'm still learning myself.