Beauty Without Form
“Beautiful CSS rich sites with invalid, incorrect or non-semantic markup and incorrect or missing DocTypes”
I love trawling the web, wading through a lot of the well known – and some not so well known – CSS gallery sites such as cssmania.com looking for inspiration, or just admiring the view. For a relatively ‘artistically challenged’ techie like myself these sites are an important source of inspiration and creativity. A bit like webdesign porn!
But, sometimes beaty is only skin deep. Looking at the source for a significant chunk of these sites shows up their inner failings…
- Missing DocTypes or older non-XHTML formats
- Non-Semantic markup
- Semantic markup with divitis and incorrect table usage
In an increasingly SEO driven web the failure of form over function is a serious failing and a disservice to clients. Having correctly formed up XHTML and semantic markup should be high up on the list when developing the site, and part of the testing phase.
And yes, this site sometimes fails on that… but I’m working on it!
Some of the biggest problems (challenges) come when using scripted products and you get a page error thrown up.
Whilst maybe it isn’t a css error it can be a beggar to track the source of the problem … a rogus post with malformed HTML, a poorly written plug in or whatever.
It rankles the life out of me when I see a page error that I can’t get to the bottom of, and I am sure that it upsets some visitors to see it too.