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Raphael -> RE: Website critique please. (6/11/2005 6:38:37 PM)
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I wrote you a bit on the subject, and tried to send it, but wound up sending you several duplicate messages with only the initial greeting. Collarme private message function just doesn't seem to handle it. I was thinking I might have to get an email from you, but I just tested and it looks like I *can* post it here without garbling, so I'm just pasting it below.
Hey,
Regarding your website, the 'official' formal validator is at
http://validator.w3.org/
Entering the URL for the main page you'll see that it first complains that there is no character encoding specified, falls back to assuming UTF-8, and then stops completely when it runs into a character that makes no sense in UTF-8. This is simple to fix. I believe your character encoding is ISO-8859-1 (Latin1 or Western European, the most common way to encode English text although UTF-8 is now preferred.) At least, the page displays fine for me with that encoding, and specifying it to the validator manually gets us past that and on to the code without any spurious errors.
The tag
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" >
should clear that up. It goes inside the <head> tag.
The next error once that is fixed is a lack of document type declaration. The validator falls back to HTML 4.01 transitional, which looks like a good fit with what you wrote, but to be formally correct you should still go ahead and declare it. The tag to do this is
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
This should be the very first line of the file.
Those are pretty much "formal" errors, not too likely to actually cause a visitor problems, but they can be quickly fixed and it helps you as the developer, to be explicit about what you are doing, and so that validation tools know what to look for.
Next error is "Line 20, column 85: required attribute "ALT" not specified". In this case, looking at it with a text mode browser and a speaker (basically like a blind person would 'see' it) I find it only mildly annoying, not a major issue but it's there. The fix is simple. This is the image tag for your main logo, just add alt=" " (that's a space.) So the entire tag would now read so:
<td valign="middle" width="160"><img
src="http://www.northernprotocol.com/images/mainlogo.jpg" width="125" height="80" alt=" " ></td>
This let's the browser know that if it cannot render the image, it can simply render a space and let it go.
The next three errors are no such attribute errors - background and height are not, strictly speaking, legal attributes to use in the context you used them. Nonetheless, browsers usually allow them there, and I wouldn't worry about it too much at this point. A browser that doesn't understand them should simply ignore them, so it shouldn't be a big deal. I'd put them on the 'fix this when I'm bored list' - I like to make my pages completely correct, of course, but I don't see how those three would cause any real-world problems.
The last error on that page is another missing alt attribute. This is on the tag for 'main.jpg' and again, looking at it as if I were blind, I find it mildly annoying. (You cannot guarantee what the user-agent is going to do when it sees that, in my setup it reads out the filename, which breaks up the flow of the website a bit, and doesn't sound very smooth or professional, but it doesn't really hinder me functionally.) The fix I would recommend is the same as for mainlogo above, simply add alt=" " and the error goes away, and the reader doesn't waste time rendering it anymore.
I haven't gone through your other pages, but I'd guess that most of the errors are the same stuff. Add the doctype declaration to each, specify the content encoding, and then the validator should quit barfing and give you a list of errors. On each missing alt, just think to yourself, how do I want a reader that can't do pictures to render this? If you just want it to skip over it, use alt=" " - if they need to be rendered, of course, you'll have to think of something else.
Looking at the camera page, for instance, I see you already do have alts on the company logos - creative, d-link, epson, etc. You might want to extend the <a href> tags to include the graphics however - when I cycle through the links on this page I just get 'more information, more information, more information' - forcing me to read through the page again, and stop at just the right point to find the link I want. This is very annoying. Extending the anchor tags to include the logos (with their alt texts) would make it a lot friendlier.
Well, as I said, I didn't spider and validate the whole site or anything, but looking around for a few minutes it looks like the errors are relatively minor stuff that should be pretty easy to fix. Use the validator on each page, and if you see anything you don't understand just mail me and I'll be happy to help.
-RaphaEl
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