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  • From: "Jesse D.d.m. Wilbur" <jdwilbur AT yahoo.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] standards compliant, tableless code on ESPN
  • Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 08:45:03 -0700 (PDT)

Indeed, I forgot the interview. It is here:
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/01/

And 'div centered' means made outta divs. sort of like Internetworkers can be
characterized as 'drink centered'.

jdw

=====
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tout comprendre c'est tout pardoner

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Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 12:07:56 -0400
From: Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>
To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/";
<internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [internetworkers] standards compliant, tableless code on ESPN
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on Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 06:50:41AM -0400, Michael Winslow Czeiszperger wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 11:53 PM, Jesse D.d.m. Wilbur wrote:
>
> >My friend sent me this interview of with the art director of ESPN.com
> >regarding
> >their decision to make the front page tableless and div centered. Way
> >to go
> >ESPN!
>
> Did you forget the interview? Also, what's "div centered"?

It seems to be a Web design practice where if you use the HTML DIV
and/or SPAN elements, in combination with CSS for presentation, rather
than using tables for layout, you're suddenly "standards compliant", and
get a lot of media attention (a la Wired News' recent redesign, which
actually is valid and accessible XHTML/CSS) even if your markup doesn't
validate and you miss the point of having a syntax in the first place ;)

The interview is here:

http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/01/
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/02/

"ESPN.com, the online sister of the ESPN cable networks, serves up more
than half a billion page views every month, so when the home page of
the site dropped all layout tables in favor of structural markup and
CSS-driven layout, the Web design community took notice. To add to the
intrigue, the site's design is (as of this writing) being adjusted over
time, so that the site is in effect making the latter stages of its
redesign process public. For a personal site to do such a thing is rare
enough; for a major commercial site to do it would have been almost
unimaginable."

I'm glad to see them moving in the right direction - it's certainly the
thing to be doing nowadays. But I'm pretty disappointed in Mike
Davidson's rather poor understanding of validation:

"Then there's validation. Telling me my site needs to validate in order
to be standards-compliant is like telling me I need a flag in my lawn
to call myself an American. For a simple, small, text-heavy site like a
blog, validation may come relatively easily, but when you have a site
like ours which dynamically writes out a lot of content, uses
third-party statistical tracking, makes liberal use of Flash, and
offers complex and flexible advertising modules, validation is simply a
pie in the sky."

I'm sorry, and I feel his pain WRT the miserable invalid stuff he has to
put into his page, via legacy systems, but I'd have rather seen him say
something more akin to "we're working on upgrading our legacy systems
so they don't spew tag soup" rather than rejecting the fundamental idea of
syntactically correct markup with a silly, offensive, throwaway metaphor.

No, Mike Davidson, we're not telling you to put a flag on your lawn,
we're telling you that your property needs to be surveyed so it's clear
where it starts and where it stops; your house to be up to electrical
code so it doesn't burn down and take the neighborhood with it; we're
asking you to use a zip code when you send mail because it makes the
system more efficient.

Anything but the flag - what a way to characterize something as
fundamental to computing as /proper syntax/. Oh, I'm being assaulted
by standards advocates - it must be some sort of weird cult. No, we're
just trying to teach you the basics you apparently never learned.

No, Mike Davidson, validation and standards compliance aren't loosely
coupled - the one is a necessary pre-requisite of the other. And I'd
love to see the ad server that won't accept encoded ampersands - why
should it matter to the software if the URL is encoded within the page?
I'm sorry, that doesn't wash. Use URLEncoding and turn the ampersands
into %38 or HTML entities and turn them into &amp;. That's how you make
a valid page. Using invalid tags like <spacer>, invalid attributes like
marginwidth and background instead of the equivalent CSS, trying to
double nest anchors (!), using invalid comments, using invalid scripts,
not using the right attributes on your script and img tags, and so on -
that's not how you make a valid page. That's how you ditch tables for
layout and let everything else fall by the wayside.

"It is probably smarter to view validation as a ideal and not as a
requirement when it comes to working on presentation-heavy,
Flash-heavy, and JavaScript-heavy sites like ours."

Unfortunately, it's not. /Especially/ if you're using Javascript
heavily. Having invalid parse trees just makes it harder to test, and
even more so when you're dumping a lot of markup right into the stream
with document.write()s.

So, I'm looking forward to the day when espn.com is valid and standards
compliant, but it isn't yet, and his excuses don't hold water.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://espn.go.com/main.html

Steve

--
hesketh.com/inc. v: (919) 834-2552 f: (919) 834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com
Book publishing is second only to furniture delivery in slowness. -b. schneier
>From lindgren AT ureach.com Wed Apr 9 12:55:51 2003
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I've been meaning to upgrade my browser.

-Alex
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Subject: RE: [internetworkers] standards compliant, tableless code on ESPN
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well stated!!! my sentiments exactly! i had a 2 hour "discussion" with
someone about this very topic this morning and 2 1/2 hours later, i'm still
working on getting my blood pressure back to normal...

Sarah

-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Champeon [mailto:schampeo AT hesketh.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 12:08 PM

on Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 06:50:41AM -0400, Michael Winslow Czeiszperger
wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 11:53 PM, Jesse D.d.m. Wilbur wrote:
>
> >My friend sent me this interview of with the art director of ESPN.com
> >regarding
> >their decision to make the front page tableless and div centered. Way
> >to go
> >ESPN!
>
> Did you forget the interview? Also, what's "div centered"?

It seems to be a Web design practice where if you use the HTML DIV
and/or SPAN elements, in combination with CSS for presentation, rather
than using tables for layout, you're suddenly "standards compliant", and
get a lot of media attention (a la Wired News' recent redesign, which
actually is valid and accessible XHTML/CSS) even if your markup doesn't
validate and you miss the point of having a syntax in the first place ;)

The interview is here:

http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/01/
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/02/

"ESPN.com, the online sister of the ESPN cable networks, serves up more
than half a billion page views every month, so when the home page of
the site dropped all layout tables in favor of structural markup and
CSS-driven layout, the Web design community took notice. To add to the
intrigue, the site's design is (as of this writing) being adjusted over
time, so that the site is in effect making the latter stages of its
redesign process public. For a personal site to do such a thing is rare
enough; for a major commercial site to do it would have been almost
unimaginable."

I'm glad to see them moving in the right direction - it's certainly the
thing to be doing nowadays. But I'm pretty disappointed in Mike
Davidson's rather poor understanding of validation:

"Then there's validation. Telling me my site needs to validate in order
to be standards-compliant is like telling me I need a flag in my lawn
to call myself an American. For a simple, small, text-heavy site like a
blog, validation may come relatively easily, but when you have a site
like ours which dynamically writes out a lot of content, uses
third-party statistical tracking, makes liberal use of Flash, and
offers complex and flexible advertising modules, validation is simply a
pie in the sky."

I'm sorry, and I feel his pain WRT the miserable invalid stuff he has to
put into his page, via legacy systems, but I'd have rather seen him say
something more akin to "we're working on upgrading our legacy systems
so they don't spew tag soup" rather than rejecting the fundamental idea of
syntactically correct markup with a silly, offensive, throwaway metaphor.

No, Mike Davidson, we're not telling you to put a flag on your lawn,
we're telling you that your property needs to be surveyed so it's clear
where it starts and where it stops; your house to be up to electrical
code so it doesn't burn down and take the neighborhood with it; we're
asking you to use a zip code when you send mail because it makes the
system more efficient.

Anything but the flag - what a way to characterize something as
fundamental to computing as /proper syntax/. Oh, I'm being assaulted
by standards advocates - it must be some sort of weird cult. No, we're
just trying to teach you the basics you apparently never learned.

No, Mike Davidson, validation and standards compliance aren't loosely
coupled - the one is a necessary pre-requisite of the other. And I'd
love to see the ad server that won't accept encoded ampersands - why
should it matter to the software if the URL is encoded within the page?
I'm sorry, that doesn't wash. Use URLEncoding and turn the ampersands
into %38 or HTML entities and turn them into &amp;. That's how you make
a valid page. Using invalid tags like <spacer>, invalid attributes like
marginwidth and background instead of the equivalent CSS, trying to
double nest anchors (!), using invalid comments, using invalid scripts,
not using the right attributes on your script and img tags, and so on -
that's not how you make a valid page. That's how you ditch tables for
layout and let everything else fall by the wayside.

"It is probably smarter to view validation as a ideal and not as a
requirement when it comes to working on presentation-heavy,
Flash-heavy, and JavaScript-heavy sites like ours."

Unfortunately, it's not. /Especially/ if you're using Javascript
heavily. Having invalid parse trees just makes it harder to test, and
even more so when you're dumping a lot of markup right into the stream
with document.write()s.

So, I'm looking forward to the day when espn.com is valid and standards
compliant, but it isn't yet, and his excuses don't hold water.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://espn.go.com/main.html

Steve

--
hesketh.com/inc. v: (919) 834-2552 f: (919) 834-2554 w: http://hesketh.com
Book publishing is second only to furniture delivery in slowness. -b.
schneier
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Subject: Re: [internetworkers] standards compliant, tableless code on ESPN
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On Wednesday 09 April 2003 12:07 pm, Steven Champeon wrote:
> Anything but the flag - what a way to characterize something as
> fundamental to computing as /proper syntax/. Oh, I'm being assaulted
> by standards advocates - it must be some sort of weird cult. No, we're
> just trying to teach you the basics you apparently never learned.


Amen to that.

Computers are not wheelcarts. Computers are flexible and logic sets of
technology. They work in one way, the do not work in the other way.

Web != magazine

Web is about displaying content, in a way. It's not aabout presenting
marketing brochures or "TV programs in this pee-cee thingy".


Salut,
Josep
--
Josep L. Guallar-Esteve Eastern Radiologists, Inc.
MaDuIxA PoWeR!
AOL vs Josep -> http://www.ibiblio.org/sinner/aol.html




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