Month: March 2003

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<h2>

What the hell is Wil Wheaton doing? He’s proud of the fact that his headings aren’t marked up with <h2> tags. They’re second level headings for Pete’s sake! What the hell? You think <span class="title"> is more appropriate? Where the hell did you learn HTML? This is exactly what <h2> is for! This and nothing else. Why get rid of it? I mean I’ve seen people proudly proclaim that they’ve removed unnecessary or inappropriate markup from their sites, hopefully making them leaner and more accessible, but Wil has replaced a fundamental HTML tag with a horrible kludge! It’s sickening. So here’s what else is wrong:

  • The page layout is done with <table>s. I don’t see any tabular data. Use CSS.
  • His main title ("WIL WHEATON DOT NET, 50,000 monkeys at 50,000 typewriters can’t be wrong") is marked with <font> tags. These are clear candidates for <hn>. Surely “WIL WHEATON DOT NET” is a first level heading?
  • The navigation links are marked as paragraphs. This is clearly an unordered list.
  • Every article is has an empty anchor preceding it. While this isn’t incorrect it certainly isn’t necessary. Why not change <a name="001227"></a><span class="title">Neverland</span> to <h3 id="001227">Neverland</h3>? That’s almost half the size.
  • Every text size specified in the stylesheet is in pts. This is a print measurement, entirely inappropriate for screen display. em or % would be much better.

That list took longer to type than it did to compile. Surely anyone interested in having their own website should want to get it right?

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Did You Read Me?

Do people even read the titles of posts? I know I don’t bother reading them on other people’s journals. It’s not as if I’m going to skip a post because the title seems unappealing. I’m not that short of time. Which, without conscious effort, leads me to the topic that I couldn’t find an entertaining title for: I’m short of time. But not really, since I’m on three weeks holidays. But a combination of Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance (12 hours straight from 20:30 Sunday to 08:30 Monday – thanks Gary), Micro-Machines for PS2 and Warcraft III has conspired to reduce my available study time. I had also hoped to get a working CMS in operation, which would make posting here much easier, or at least faster, but I’m stuck on a particular problem that I’m convinced should be very easy to solve. When I find the solution I’ll kick myself hard enough to break both my legs. Damn it’s frustrating. Until then, expect posts to be fewer and farther between than usual.

On a design note: Apparently the old dashed borders didn’t look too well in IE/Win, so I’ve replaced them with solid borders. I figured that anyone who uses IE/Win obviously doesn’t care about attractive rendering, but apparenly I was wrong.

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