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WARNING: Web Standards Are Boring & Sometimes Out Of Date

Guvnr.com and Web Standards

2 Nov
World Wide Web Consortium logo

There's a lot of talk about web standards. Here's some more.

What are web standards?

Rules for producing well-coded, user-friendly websites, set down by a very important and useful group of gordo-geeks, collectively referred to as the World Wide Web Consortium, or the W3C for short.

They sound lovely. But rules should be broken, no?

99% of the time, no. The other 1%, well, yes.

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UPDATE: Guvnr.com Validates 100%

Bit of an update to this post, which I have to say sounds a wee bit flippant!

It rained a lot last weekend. So I found some time to rearrange those opacity issued I mentioned in this post, and now this site is squeaky clean from top to toe.

Damn, that's most conformist, I know. :P

For example, guvnr.com?

Here's the deal; ideally, websites "validate".

Guvnr.com doesn't conform. Or rather, it conforms to everything but four snippets of code, out of thousands, therefore, strictly-speaking, it doesn't validate.

Practically everything I wanted to do fitted in rather conveniently with the ruleset. The exception was opacity. For instance, cursor over the orange-bordered boxes to the right. Individually, they'll change opacity as you move from one to the other. (If they don't, your browser is very old - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ is what you need.)

Opacity is a feature that isn't recognised by the W3C's current standard, but which will be in the next edition of standards, CSS3.

Does that matter?

No. Unless you want to display a pretty ugly badge at the bottom of your webpage that says you're a good boy scout. But what does matter is that you only break the rules when it doesn't affect web standards, because your 'impropriety' is only so due to the rules not having yet caught up with advances in web development. Adhere to what one can, never stray from usability - making sites accessible - but don't be held hack by the fact these guys havn't got the time to sit down together and thrash out the latest rules.

Besides, I was thrown out of the cubs, let alone the scouts.

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Posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008
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  1. lazynitwit November 22nd, 2008 at 10:31 am

    roll on CSS3. Nice site

  2. dual November 25th, 2008 at 1:16 pm

    just control the opacity with javascript?

  3. the_guv November 25th, 2008 at 1:56 pm

    @ lazynitwit, indeed, will be top, tx. @ dual, am now rebuilding the site. You're right, thanks, I have no excuse! Will do that.

  4. SnowFallBaby December 13th, 2008 at 6:44 pm

    clever use of jquery, just add an extra rule for the opacity

  5. the_guv December 13th, 2008 at 7:11 pm

    tx SnowFallBaby, appreciate that. Damn, there's a whole bunch of changes I want to make...

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