I recently went to a web design company’s website where they were waxing lyrical about accessibility on the web. Talking enthusiastically about creating websites that use the most modern technologies and creating accessible user experiences for all. This is brilliant I thought. Being the nosy type of person that I am (my colleagues will back me up on that statement) I decided to have a little look at their source code to see how their own page was constructed. Indeed they were using HTML 5, but were they utilising it in the correct way, nope. It was almost as if they were jumping on the band wagon, without any real idea why they should be using the doctype.
Just as a very basic example, the use of HTML 5 can help cure that persistent problem of divitis where divs are wrapped within divs that are wrapped within divs. HTML 5 gives us new opportunities of structuring the page in a way that helps make it much more accessible and elegant. With the new nav, header, section and article tags we can construct pages that have real meaning and logic. This website seemed to have completely missed the point. Although their doctype was HTML 5 their page contained no HTML 5 elements at all. It’s something that I found a little perplexing. If they were concerned about support for the new HTMLÂ 5 features they could always create some sort of fallback with JavaScript to account for the various browsers that do not support and understand these new tags. If you are going to advocate using the newest technologies to your clients, why aren’t you using them yourselves.
This company is missing an opportunity to showcase what these new technologies can do, re-enforcing their advocacy and helping to demonstrate to their potential clients what they can do for them. I’m no developer, not by a LONG shot, but it just baffled me a little bit, that’s all. Maybe they have a perfectly valid reason for not utilising their new HTML 5 website, but to me it doesn’t seem clear what that reason is.
LOL at your point about “divitis”.
Once I helped my friend when he renovated his website; and yes, he did that “divitis.” There was this main box for content, and it’s the divs inside the divs. One time, he asked me to change the code in class “main”.
“Could you change “main,” please?”
“Sure.”
*30 minutes looking at the source*
“Dude, seriously, which “main” exactly that you want me to change? We have, I don’t know, five “mains” here. Here, “main” with one n. “Mainn” with two ns. “Mainnn” with three ns… DUDE.”
“Ah, please change the “main” with 4 ns.”
I kinda understand why somebody need to beat the hell out of another person just to state his point.
LOL Nindya, we are always on the same wave length. It is always frustrating when someone has coded a website without the foresight of thinking that someone else might need to work on it. I have been there too, where the coding style may very well make sense to that one person that originally coded it but is a complete mess to anyone else…Why can’t people follow standards, it’s really not that hard!! hehe!!