There’s so much great stuff written about web standards available for free on the web that it’s easy to forget how much bad stuff is also out there; and how many people are willing to support it just because it’s easier than putting in a little extra effort to follow best practice.
Over the weekend one of the most popular stories on Delicious.com was teaching the use of lazy CSS hacks, the type of which I thought everybody was convinced enough to do away with; the star and underscore hacks for targeting IE6 & IE7, the hacks which we’ve been saying (for years) shouldn’t be used anymore.
Disregarding the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’, and the validation argument — some of my stylesheets don’t validate, and there are good reasons for that — I’d like to give a few other reasons why using this method is not a good idea.
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To great fanfare, The Queen, in the company of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, unveiled the new British Monarchy website today. Unfortunately, what they unveiled was a real dog’s dinner.
Royal.gov.uk highlights the worst elements of the practice of web development; on only the second page I visited it became obvious that the site hasn’t been tested on any browser other than Internet Explorer, and a peek at the source code left me shocked.
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A calendarial mishap left me thinking that Blog Action Day was on the 18th October when in fact it is, of course, today. It’s 23.00 here as I write this, so I have one hour to write a post and officially get away with it.
So the title of the post is “web standards and the environment”, which at first seems pretty incongruous. To be honest, at second and third it still seems pretty incongruous. But I want to make the case that concerning yourself with the environment is like concerning yourself with web standards.
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