W3C Compliant - Google

vedwards

Newbie to web design but often wondered why there is so much space on either side of a page left blank? Back to the browser and Google search engine to fine what's the story. Noted the clean white boarder on both sides of the search box except for one area only several px hi & wide. Then I decided to see how compliant Google were with W3C and !!!!! 38 errors 2 warnings!!

Newbie to web design but often wondered why there is so much space on either side of a page left blank?

When designing a web page, you have to decide whether to go for fluid width (expands to fill the width of the client's display) or fixed width (has a set width in pixels). A fluid width, on the face of it, sounds like a good idea, but when you consider the diversity of screens and mobile devices that could be used to view the page, it is nigh on impossible to do a fluid width layout that works well on everything from a 300px phone screen to a 1920px LCD monitor.

Most computers support 1024px width at a minimum. If you design for this width, you may have a tiny strip of blankness on either side of the page (most designers use 960 or 980px to allow for the extra width that the scrollbars take up). The same website will have much larger blank areas on either side when viewed on a 1920px monitor. Most smartphones rely on zoom and scroll techniques to render the webpage acceptably on a screen that cant support 1024px width. Essentially the 960px width is a lowest common denominator to give you a pixel-accurate layout across a broad range of devices.

Then I decided to see how compliant Google were with W3C and !!!!! 38 errors 2 warnings!!

W3C compliance is a good sanity check for well formed HTML and a nice ideal. If you're page isn't rendering right, a W3C check can often highlight the problem. But there's a lot more to good code than the W3C spec guidelines. Any deviations from the spec on the google pages are certainly not down to sloppy coding by the google folks, they're done for good technical resons.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Liam Byrne

I just had a look and the validator seems to be objecting to JavaScript code, viewing a valid "less than" character - "<" as the start of a tag!

Don't ever remember it doing that before!

Liam Byrne

Liam Byrne wrote: »

I just had a look and the validator seems to be objecting to JavaScript code, viewing a valid "less than" character - "<" as the start of a tag!

Don't ever remember it doing that before!

Yup - I've seen the checker trip up over inline javascript before. It usually throws a wobbly when I put google maps in. If I recall, it's usually to do with displaying a marker with HTML code in it.

Liam Byrne

Deleted User wrote: »

Yup - I've seen the checker trip up over inline javascript before. It usually throws a wobbly when I put google maps in. If I recall, it's usually to do with displaying a marker with HTML code in it.

That (the HTML tags) I could understand, but from what I've done quick checks on it seems to be tripping up on basic if a<b { code!

cormee

Deleted User wrote: »

Yup - I've seen the checker trip up over inline javascript before. It usually throws a wobbly when I put google maps in. If I recall, it's usually to do with displaying a marker with HTML code in it.

You should escape your html tags in JavaScript - ie. <\/strong>

Eoin

Also note that Google appear to use a table for layout!