For a number of reasons I had to look at the SalesOnline.ie site today. I would have thought they’d have got round to fixing its basic brokenness, but I was wrong.
If you try to view that site in any browser you will suffer.
Why?
Basic HTML code hasn’t been used.
How hard can it be to specify which version of (X)HTML you’re using?
If the “designer” had even picked up a book on HTML for beginners they’d have learnt about the basic elements of a properly formatted SGML document using HTML markup.
To save repetition the concept is simple. If you open a “tag”, which is a bit of code to describe how something should be rendered on the screen by your browser, then you should close it. In XHTML that “should” becomes “must”.
Any (x)html document will have a number of elements:
HEAD – the top of the document. This can tell you what the document is about and how to treat it ie. is it html 4.* or xhtml 1.*. You can also include lots of other “meta” information
BODY – the main body of the text
Salesonline’s site tries to break all these standards.
Neither the “header” nor the “body” tag is closed, so the browser has no way of knowing where the page ends.
They force you to load their video on their main page each and every time you visit – not exactly sane usage of multimedia
And yet they claim to be using “best in class technology”. You’d think they’d be able to setup a proper website!
I’d suggest they don’t mean that they are web designers, but advertisers.
I agree, though – shite website.
in fact, they /do/ close the ‘body’ tag, but they close it in lowercase, where it was opened in uppercase.
there are no indicators of what type of HTMl they’re using, but the fact that they use font tags, valigns, etc /as well as/ mentioning a .css file means they probably intended HTML4.01, where a lot of the rubbish in that site is actually allowed…
Kae
They’re an online company. Surely their own website should meet minimum standards?
Michele
“none” is a minimum standard 😉
This is very common in Ireland when the business is running very well off-line, but salesonline.ie are all about “ONLINE” so you expect a litle bit more, but hey that’s life…
I love to know when is the last time they actually visited their own website.
They are in fact an advertising company and as such the chances are they are not the most apt webmasters.However who gives a crap whether the HTML is standardized?, as long as browsers can display it.If you ask me Michele you’ve got too much time on your hands.
ExtotheC
Thanks for your comment.
I think you are missing the point entirely.
The site didn’t display particularly well as a result of the terrible HTML
Of course it’s no longer online, so you’d have to check out archive.org to see what I was actually talking about
Regards
Michele
“However who gives a crap whether the HTML is standardized?”
I do. I want my job to be easier. I want browsers to support stricter standards so that I can produce better quality websites for my clients at a cheaper cost. I want people to be able to have the same experience on-line regardless of their choice of platform or browser or, in future, device. I give a crap. So should everyone else.