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Striving to be nothing Feb 19, 01:12

and

Sarai’s two blog posts on striving to be better have generated quite a response. First there’s Brandi of Oh-Blondie.org with her thoughts on striving to be better, which predictably are that she has a life and no time to mess around with web standards. Then there’s Catherine’s post on striving to be better, she’s trying to improve her website but isn’t too fussed about it right now. The focus of this blog is going to be Brandi and her commenters.

I’m a firm believer that sites should be accessible to everyone and that this includes optimizing your images, writing POSH and in general just paying attention to how you put your site together. These people believe that they should be allowed to use tables, have embedded styles, go without a DOCTYPE, use bloated and useless JavaScript and be immune from anyone telling them that they’re doing it wrong. Dammit, they are doing it right because it’s the way they want to do it (screw web standards, honestly what did they ever do for you).

To put it bluntly, I don’t care about HTML, CSS, or the oh-so-wonderful Wordpress.

I wouldn’t be so hard on myself if I were you, everyone hates Wordpress. Of course everyone hates Cutenews too, but that’s okay because you don’t care that it’s insecure and crappy, you’re right. There are plenty of Cutenews alternatives that don’t suck, these include Chryp and Flatpress which is flat file like Cutenews, no database required. If Chyrp, Textpattern and Flatpress don’t catch your fancy then there’s always Expression Engine or Symphony. As for HTML and CSS unlike yours mine hasn’t got 110 errors, it isn’t bloated and I have a DOCTYPE. Why is a DOCTYPE important? Because without it the browser has to guess what you were trying to do and it isn’t always right. The same is true of Character Encoding (which you don’t have).

In this setting, the browser will attempt to parse your page in backward–compatible fashion, rendering your CSS as it might have looked in IE4, and reverting to a proprietary, browser–specific DOM. (IE reverts to the IE DOM; Mozilla and Netscape 6 revert to who knows what.)
Fix Your Site WIth the Right DOCTYPE!

Did you know that the more bloated your code is the slower your site will load? No, of course you don’t because you have friends that demand your attention. I ran your site through CSS Tidy got it down to 147 lines and it reduced it from 4.171kb to 2.342kb. I managed to knock it down to 83 lines on my own, a difference of 121 lines, while keeping your styling intact (with the exception of text-align:justify;). I used shorthand to reduce the number of lines in your stylesheet and I eliminated unnecessary things like having the font-size, family, line-height and text-align in every single property. Declare it once in the body and unless you’re planning on changing something specific later on leave it at that.

I ran your site through the Web Page Analyzer and compared your results to mine. Here are a few of them:

There are reasons why people like to talk about web standards, for one it makes browsing the internet easier for everyone. Imagine if everyone catered to a specific browser, like IE, and imagine if everyone left it up to the browser to decide how to display their site… oh wait most people do. Heh, my bad.

You know I was thinking and you probably wouldn’t have spoken up if you hadn’t felt as those what Sarai said applied to you in some general sense. You wanted to protect your right to do whatever you wanted with your site and that is perfectly fine (like I said, good for business). But I would also like to maintain my right to throw funny things like logic and fact your way while watching you flounder about with the excuse that you have a boyfriend and a life and gawd you just can’t learn anything about web standards. Either accept that you suck and quit trying to come up with excuses as to why, or give me more to write about on IP, either way it’s all good.

I’d also like to point out that by saying people who actually take the time to turn out a decent product are completely devoid of a social life you’re making yourself look like a jackass. Obviously we don’t have boyfriends, I don’t but that’s beside the point, we don’t have friends, we don’t have families or hobbies to occupy us. After all, if we did then our sites would be as bloated, crappy and slow as yours are, right? Of course they would, god forbid people do something the right way simply because they can, most people learn about standards and such over a period of years (if they are self taught) and not in a matter of days. I’m sure that if we sat here for 8 hours everyday reading about and discussing web design and standards we’d all be professionals making money off of it, but we don’t and we aren’t and most of us have no desire to be. This is our hobby and we’re going to do it right so we don’t end up like you trying to come up with lame excuses to explain why we never bothered inserting a DOCTYPE.

I have commented people with “popular” blogs, and the comments I’ll receive back are either not even worth the comment or they are criticizing. I taught myself HTML, CSS, XHTML, Photoshop CS3 Extended +, etc. and became very good, and than I taught a friend of mine and she became just as good, and maybe better. She won’t even comment my blog now, because she doesn’t believe it matches her standards.
Kyle Dylan Conner

Part of your problem might be that you comment on other peoples blogs for comments. I get a few comments here and there and I rarely ever reply to them because, well unless something interests me I don’t really care. This whole returning comments thing has nearly always puzzled me, I left you a comment because I had something to share with you (like you had something to share with me, through your blog) and nothing more. I used to comment on 40+ blogs a day in an effort to get a few comments and it worked out, I got a lot of comments. Then I started really reading them and I realised that they too were comment whoring and I became embarrassed.

For someone who claims to be good at HTML your errors, according to the validator, seem to be mostly from unclosed tags or confusion as to what DOCTYPE you’re using (here’s a hint: when you’re using XHTML you should close all tags <br> is wrong and <br /> is right).

As I said before, what it all comes down to is that you all want to wallow in your mediocrity while still getting the love. Remember that sitting there saying that people who understand the need for web standards have no lives makes you look like a jackass. The blame cannot be placed on Sarai, Jem, Brent, myself or anyone who calls you out on your bullshit, it can only be placed on you. If you do a sub par job then admit to it and cut the crap, no one wants to listen to you.

rant, stupidity

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