Two Banjos At Once: The Blog

Living with standards compliance

My First Web Page

September 21, 2009

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Some digging in a dusty file box the other day yielded no fewer than three floppy disks. What wisdom might these ancient tablets convey? Fortunately, there was at least one device in the house which still had a floppy drive. Result: mostly disappointment. The files were either first drafts of things I’d sent off to magazine editors in the late 1990s, or grouchy letters to my landlords of the same era. However, there was, archived with apparent pride, my first effort as a Web developer.

Step into the WABAC Machine. The year is 1997. I was the admin assistant for a team of software engineers. I was also something of a mascot; if the guys (yup, all guys, except for me) had a noncritical technical task they thought I could handle with a little instruction, they threw it to me, because I guess I looked really grateful to be doing something besides ordering lunch and taking the abusive phone calls of the company CEO. The most enduring instructions they gave me was how to use FTP, IrfanView, and NotePad to develop the team Web site. Of course, these tools seemed insufficient once I made a few changes–I wanted colors! Silly typefaces! Dizzying background images! And HTML seemed so hard to learn…

I remember downloading a lot of trial versions of the trendy WYSIWYG software of the time: an early version of Frontpage (which had me puzzling over these things called “stylesheets”), Adobe PageMill, and the editor which came with Netscape Gold. The one I used the most seemed to be NetObjects Fusion, which I notice is still available. It was a big, handholding, friendly giant of a program; it set everything into tables and FONT tags, and we were buddies. I felt masterful.

Nobody I worked with was a Web professional–no designers, no information architects, no UI devs. Creating Killer Web Sites had only just been published, Web Pages That Suck was treated mostly as a humorous diversion, and even Jakob Nielsen was as yet rather obscure to the average person making a Web page. It was in this Wild West environment that I devised this:
My First Web Page

I’ll enhance that retro atmosphere with a sample of its markup:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
   <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/4.03 [en] (WinNT; I) [Netscape]">
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Page-Enter" CONTENT="revealTrans(Duration=1,Transition=6)">
   <TITLE>ES Home Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BACKGROUND="amoeba.jpg">

<CENTER>
<H1>
<FONT FACE="Wide Latin"><FONT SIZE=+4>Engineering Services</FONT></FONT></H1></CENTER>

<CENTER><IMG SRC="grey_dots.gif" ALT="grey_dots.gif (6699 bytes)" HEIGHT=47 WIDTH=890></CENTER>

<CENTER><FONT FACE="HELVETICA"> </FONT></CENTER>

<UL>
<LI>
<FONT FACE="HELVETICA"><FONT SIZE=+2><A HREF="[...]">ES
Quote Status</A></FONT></FONT></LI>

<LI>
<FONT FACE="HELVETICA"><FONT SIZE=+2><A HREF="[...]">Current
ES Status Report</A></FONT></FONT></LI>

Yeah, go on. Snort, carp, whatever. But this is how we did things then, back when browsers “innovated” with crap like BLINK and MARQUEE. A year later I was back to using text editors–haven’t touched a WYSIWYG since. Just a year later I was using CSS and disdaining FONT, and a year after that I was riding the dot-com boom as it crested. So it’s worth examining your old work product, if only to swell with pride over how far you’ve come since then.

What was your first Web page like?

In Praise of dl

April 15, 2009

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Consider the task of delivering this:
heading-and-data

It’s a construct you’ll see everywhere on the Web: a text heading in bold type, with perhaps some background styling, and subsidiary text beneath it, often styled a little differently, such as in a lighter font style. The heading and the content beneath it seem to be related; visual design can give more evidence of that relationship with flourishes like the gray border enclosing the text blocks in the example above.

So how is this very ordinary construct expressed in HTML? Sadly, often in the most verbose, inflexible ways possible.

For instance:

<p>
	<strong>
		Heading
	</strong>
</p>
<p>
	Stuff under heading
</p>
<p>
	Stuff under heading
</p>
<p>
	Stuff under heading
</p>

Or:

<div class="heading">
		Heading
</div>
<div class="data">
	Stuff under heading
</div>
<div class="data">
	Stuff under heading
</div>
<div class="data">
	Stuff under heading
</div>

Or even (shudder):

<table>
	<tr>
		<th>
			Heading
		</th>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>
			Stuff under heading
		</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>
			Stuff under heading
		</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>
			Stuff under heading
		</td>
	</tr>
</table>

Why? There’s an obvious solution in dl, which has been in the HTML specification since, for crying’ out loud, version 2.0. All you need to express this particular data structure are dl, its subsidiary elements, dt and dd, and basic CSS skills.

<dl>
	<dt>
		Heading
	</dt>
	<dd>
		[Stuff under heading--
		express each as paragraphs, list items, or other elements]
	</dd>
</dl>

Advantages of this approach include preserving an obvious heading/data relationship between those elements. If there is a situation in which your CSS does not render, user agent defaults will still indicate this relationship. For instance, in Firefox, the content enclosed in dd will have a slight indent from the left margin of dt. In screen readers, the dl will be announced as a definition list, and its numbers of items (dd) reported as well, which helps non-visual users understand where the list begins and ends.

Another advantage is flexibility in styling. There’s nothing intrinically presentational about dl, unlike strong or tr; indeed, you can make the same construct look very different with very simple CSS:

Three ways to style a definition list

Three ways to style a definition list


So why is this marvel of semantic markup so underused? Do we really prefer typing in strong? Is it human nature to take the long way? Has the div Element Marketing Association been extraordinarily successful?

Please tell me why.

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