Cream My Jeans, Nerd-Style
Monday, July 12, 2004
This is so ridiculously cool.
I came across
a tool that makes standards compliance easier than ever and today it proved its worth immensely. I'm raving about an RSS feed showing the standards compliance status of my websites, thanks to some clever and public programming by Ben Hammersley. Yes, that Ben Hammersley, as in
he wrote the book on RSS Ben Hammersley.
What this means is that I now have an RSS feed for each site I want to monitor. I popped open my blog reader today and had a feed specific to this site complaining, telling me that I had 8 errors on my blog. Since the redesign has only been up for a few weeks and it validated when I first made it, one of my recent posts must have thrown it for a loop. After scratching my head a bit and spending a few minutes debugging, it turns out that my last post misused
the blockquote tag, which can only contain block-level elements within it, not just plain text. It was fun for this self-proclaimed web guru to learn something new about my old friend HTML! Wrapping the contents of the blockquote with a pair of paragraph tags did the trick and all was well again.
This is a common problem amongst CSS-aware web designers - you pour your heart and soul into making a website with the latest technology, making sure that both sides of the creation come together nicely, the art
and science, the visual design
and underlying markup. You try to make something that looks great, loads fast and uses valid markup with a CSS layout for maximum accessibility and search engine ranking, and guess what? It works! Your client approves, you deploy it and it validates... at first. Then come the errors later on, the ones that suck your soul and require the thankless task of fixing the markup like a dutiful code monkey. This happens all the time, especially when combined with the ease of churning out markup due to blogging, something that's an integral part of
our web strategy at my day job.
The super cool thing is that this tool caught something I'd usually never see. I'd never know there was a problem by how the page renders in my browser, since it looked just fine. It'd be sitting there with these errors due to a single lapse in proper markup and throwing the browser into slow-ass quirks mode, all under my radar. Worse, that markup would migrate to the archives and sit there invalid for who knows how long, making a future clean-up of the old pages an intimidating chore that would probably never get done. Even if I still have yet to clean up the stains in the old logs, at least now I can be sure that all of my new creations are wearing clean underwear. This cobbler's children need not go unshod!
On a related note, this is exactly the kind of post that I think might be more appropriate
on my portfolio site instead, since this probably for more friends and family than other web dorks. Hmm, I've thought about whether to turn that site into a blog as well and the reorganization challenges behind doing so. I may have to do that soon just for my own sanity, give myself an outlet for this kind of technical writing.
Wow, I'm accelerating my ascent into uber-dorkitude quicker than I thought. I just hope I can still converse with other humanoids in meatspace if the transformation continues at this pace. Thank Vishnu or capitalism or whatever you worship for soccer, movies, and girlfriends that like salsa dancing classes.