A good week
This week, I have mostly been reworking some of our existing web sites to use web standards instead of ghastly nested-table design hacks.
It’s satisfying that, after two years of banging on about it, people that matter (i.e. managers, marketing people, producers) have started to smell the coffee. And the coffee smells a lot like valid (X)HTML/CSS/DOM/ECMAScript.
The benefits of all this? Sites that:
- download more quickly
- are more accessible to both disabled people and those browsing the web using non-traditional devices (e.g. PDAs, web-enabled phones etc)
- are more easily maintained and — when necessary — redesigned
Some fruits of my recent labours:
- Journals.iop.org. Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but uses one table for positioning the elements of the page; we needed similarity of presentation in Netscape 4.
- Coming soon: nanotechweb.org. The work is done, but the client hasn’t signed it off yet so I can’t make the changes live. Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional. I reckon I’ve shaved 10KB from the homepage, plus the savings in not using images for the navbar (another 4KB).
- Also coming soon: a new CSS navbar for our Electronic Journals service.