I’ve just redesigned my website (three pages) to try and clean up the code and add a bit more colour. I’d be grateful for a critique of my coding. I’ve run the pages through the W3C validator, and the errors it flagged didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Any skilled interpreters out there? Also, the code I’ve used to preload images for the image rollovers didn’t make a lot of sense to me – did I do it properly?
PS. I’m not really after a design critique – I get awfully sensitive about all that – but if there’s something horrendously wrong, please let me know. I’m basically after impressions as to the coding. It was supposed to be XHTML 1.0 compliant, but it’s not quite there.
For some reason I couldn’t link to the site in Netscape 6 or Opera 5 (can’t explain why) but it looked fine at 640, 800 and 1024 in IE 5.5 – the only (very, very minor) issue was that the ‘mail me’ icon got pushed down a tad at 640 but that’s no big deal. Basically, it’s IE compliant, if that helps any!
I think Allaire’s Homesite (4.52 is the current built, I believe although a newer version might just be upon us) is a great HTML editor cum validifier cum learning tool. If you were to download that, it would really explain all the issues for each browser and teach you as much as you can handle.
Don’t want to turn this into a text editor debate but it really is an excellent tool, matt (and a manageable download on 56k). Didn’t look at the code too closely but in standard HTML , <BR> is enough (you have a couple with ‘/’ included). Seriously minor pick. Equally minor is that the main block of text could be coded more tidily.
The site’s looking great – clean, nice font and sizes, mouseover icons – I guess you’ve doubled up on the bottom navigation but that’s ok. Like it!
I was recommended to use <br /> as it’s XHTML compliant but still works in HTML. It should work in NS – I checked in in NS 6.1 last night. I’d be interested to hear how it works in Opera mind.
I just used Wordpad for the coding, plus a freebie I was emailed called EditPlus 2. I’ll take a look at the main text coding – I just copied that from the old site.
I’m sure it would work in Netscape 6 (v4xx is another country :eek: ), just can’t link to it which doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’ll work when I reboot…
Actually, I find there’s fewer variables in the current browsers so although Opera used to be the stiffest WW3 ‘compliance test’, there’s not the difference there once was. It might well be fine in Opera.
The thing with text editors, IMHO, is that there are editors that code and there’s editors that teach well and code – that’s one of the reasons I like HomeSite so much.
I see! <BR/> is XHTML compliant. Certainly doesn’t affect it’s HTML rendering so that’s cool.
My first post here… Yojimbo suggested I have a gander at your question. I just looked at your code, and I reckon it’s close to immaculate.
The only criticism I would have is the use of the FONT tag and colouring in parallel with stylesheets - why not set the font colour with a CLASS in the stylesheet, then use a SPAN tag (or indeed a CLASS on the <P> tag) for efficiency. And my personal preference would be to use <P> tags around a paragraph rather than <BR><BR>.
In Netscape 4.x the only error is that the tinyFont class is so small as to be illegible. I have a JS routine I could give you that would allow you to swap between two externally referenced CSS files depending on browser type (if you want). That way you could specify an exact font size for NS.
I also add a plug for Allaire HomeSite here - I’d never use anything else.
Thanks jjimm (and happy first post). I guess I stuck with FONT and BR tags as well just through force of (bad) habit. I started using XHTML as a few people have mentioned that it may become more of a standard, and that it’s easier to write in it since it’s backwards compatible.
