Inexcusable Sloppy Code
posted by DL Byron on February 11, 2005
The Lincoln Bicentennial site is up and powered by Marqui. I was interested in the site, to check Marqui’s code, and see what their system is outputting. For a company that gets blogging and the blogosphere, they sure don’t get Standards-based design or valid code. I’m normally not a standards-nazi, but viewed the source and checked the validation. A note to Marqui’s developers, just because you declare an XHTML document type, doesn’t mean the document is. I can excuse using tables for layout, ok, probably banged it out quickly, but the lack of character encoding, mixed tags, and more is just plain sloppy.
While Marqui maybe helping their client to educate the public about Abraham Lincoln’s accomplishments, they’re certainly not doing anything for them with that code.
I've been evangelizing Standards-based design for years and sites like that just make me sigh. What are we not doing as evangelists to get the word out to a CMS developer that character encoding is important?
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Comments
Feb 15 | Richard MacManus said:
Good spotting and I do hope Marqui addresses the issue. Having standards-compliant HTML is very important these days.
Feb 15 | Richard MacManus said:
Ahem, of course this reminded me to check my own page for validation - and it doesn’t completely :-) Heh, time to go practise what I preach…
Feb 15 | Janet said:
Yep, thanks for mentioning it. It was noted by our partner who developed the Abe Lincoln site. We’re aware of the issues with our code, and we’re working on fixing them - in a new version that our developers are working on now.
Janet
Feb 15 | -b- said:
Richard,
A note that it isn’t all about valid code, at any time a site could become invalid from an errant character or ampersand. My concern was with no character encoding and declaring the page an xhtml document when it clearly wasn’t.
Janet,
Thanks for the update. As with previous criticism, Marqui responds and works to correct their mistakes.