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!
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