Jason Bagley » Code

CSS links

Jason — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:55:09 +0000

I’ve been doing some pretty hectic slicing and dicing of xhtml and css of late and in the process have learnt a few more tricks with CSS. For example, how to properly use definition lists (

,
), proper font sizing and absolute and relative positioning of parent and child elements just to name a few. Here are a few CSS links that might be of interest: Formatting a definition list 8 fonts you probably don’t use in css, but should The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts with CSS – proper font sizing! Pixels to Ems Conversion Table for CSS 70 Expert Ideas For Better CSS Coding Improving Code Readability With CSS Styleguides Listmatic – formatting lists ( , , )

Web standards in South Africa – Top 10 SA sites validated

Jason — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 09:26:08 +0000

Web standards doesn’t seem to be a very important aspect of functional web design here in South Africa. Websitewriters.co.za was recently launched to try and help South African designers relise that Web Standards aren’t two words made up by some university graduate, so I thought it would be a good time to visit some of the top SA sites to see if they have adhered to web standards.

You might ask, whats the reason for using Web Standards?
Quote from WebStandards.org: Web standards reduce the cost and complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability of any site published on the Web.

If you want more info, read Roger Johansson’s post on Ten reasons to learn and use web standards. There really shouldn’t be any doubting the use of Web Standards after reading that post. :-)

So lets get into the nitty gritty. I used the W3c’s HTML validator to validate 10 SA sites homepages. Below find the results of my little experiment:

Mweb.co.za – 302 errors
News24.com – 145 errors
ITWeb.co.za – 481 errors
IOL.co.za – 633 errors
Ananzi.co.za – Failed validation
Supersport.co.za – Failed validation
iAfrica.com – 585 errors
CareerJunction.co.za – 50 errors
Mail&Gaurdian – 786 errors
Telkom.co.za – 29 errors

I’m actually not as shocked as I thought I would be. I almost kind of expected it. Seems like news sites, like Mail&Gaurdian, IOL and ITWeb, racked up close to 2000 errors! Are half those errors even neccesary? I’m willing to bet that if they just used valid HTML elements and attributes, that error-log would almost halve, without them having to tweak any of their CSS files (If they even know what CSS is!?).

With bandwidth and internet speed an issue in South Africa, these sites aren’t helping with their over-crowed and invalid markup. You actually don’t have an excuse not to use Web Standards. So why then?

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HTML Statistics

Jason — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:10:13 +0000

Everyone loves statistics, especially us web designers. From checking your traffic stats 5 times a day to Technorati this or that, everyone likes to compare stats.

So a couple of okes did a web study on sites that validated, which type of HTML tags were most common or how many different ID tags were used. These studies were based on less than 1000 websites or pages. So the results are more interesting than conclusive. December 2005 roles around and in steps Big Daddy and did “an analysis of a sample of slightly over a billion documents”. Woah…

Some interesting facts

Most pages have 19 elements specified. , , , etc
The top 4 elements used are , , and <body> – funny thing is that 3 of the 4 elements are optional in HTML.</li> <li>The most popular class names used are footer, menu, title, small, text and nav – and all these class names have all been proposed in HTML5.</li> <li>Interesting that “msonormal” was the 13th most used class name which is a Microsoft Office generated tag. Just shows you how many people still use that stone-age way of coding sites.</li> <li>More pages use the completely worthless <meta name=”revisit-after”> than use the <em> element!</li> <li>The <body> element is probably the most abused element. Out of the top 20 attributes (bgcolor=”", topmargin=”", link=”" etc) 9 are completely invalid, and 5 have been deprecated for 8 years, which is half the lifetime of the web!</li> <li>Tables. There was a scary amount of table tags without any td tags. Empty tables?!</li> <li>The <br> element is used more than the <p> element.</li> <li>Some of the <a> elements rel=”" attributes values have mostly been spurred on of late by WordPress (rel=”external”) and the Web 2.0 social tagging phenomenon (rel=”tag”).</li> <li>The <script> element has some funny attributes associated with it. The language=”" attribute is the most used, but has been deprecated for years. Funny thing is that people also can’t spell it – langauge=”", langugage=”" and languaje=”".</li> </ul> <p>Go read some of the stats for yourself at <a href="http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html">http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html</a>. Darn interesting.</p> </article> </main></body></html>