In a recent article, IAllenkelhet.no (Norwegian) claims that a survey conducted last year revealed that while 90% of us expect web developers to have expert knowledge about HTML, a mere 35% of the developers actually do. Even fewer know much about WAI or WCAG.

Unfortunately, this is probably very close to the truth.

I believe that it might be due to the fact that many developers are highly trained and skilled professionals, for example computer scientists, software engineers, etc. Having a degree, they are expected to just “know” such a simple thing as HTML.

Sure, most probably understand the concept of opening and closing tags (although many fall short), but I doubt the majority has ever looked up the HTML spec. at W3.org, or know how to use the elements specified by the standard. Probably because HTML is considered too simple — i.e. not that interesting.

But if you aren’t interested in learning about how to use the available tools, you shouldn’t be working with them.

</rant>

The first Internet Explorer 8 beta version was released yesterday.

As far as the Acid3 test goes, it made it all the way to 10/100 before it crashed. Restarted, opened up the previous page (Acid3 test) and crashed. Restarted, opened up the previous page (Acid3 test) and crashed. Restarted, … Good start

Well, at least we’ll be able to test its CSS support (is supposed to support CSS 2.1 in its final release - yay!) - which is good news.

Update: There’s an article on Ajaxian about what’s new in IE8. Good stuff.

The Acid 3 test went public yesterday. As far as I know, IE6 wont make it to 100.

On a related note, the IE team have been listening to the critics and are changing the default behavior of IE8 to “actual standards mode”. Good news. Kudos to the IE team for caring.

In a recent blog posting - Er validering verdiløst? - Chrisitian Johansen argues that it is important to create valid HTML and that valid HTML is a good indication of high quality code.

I agree that although valid HTML in itself does not guarantee a good product, it is important to write valid HTML. Both for your own and for other developers’ sake. In some cases, it might even affect the user experience.

Someone has to maintain the front-end code base, and valid HTML is most def. important when it comes to maintaining HTML/CSS/JavaScript and supporting all kinds of browsers/clients.

Valid HTML is also much more likely to be accessible HTML (although other factors, such as using Semantic HTML are more important) and might also play a role in SEO. It might also prove important for future use of existing code.

Further, validating your HTML may help you by pointing out unintended and/or unnoticed mistakes, and thus spare you hours of work, especially when dealing with design implementation (CSS) and cross-browser compatibility issues. At least the kind of errors that are under your control.

A point I’d like to add to the discussion, is how many programmers realize the importance of well-written back-end code — clean, easy to read, (correctly) object-oriented, using well-known patterns, sleek algorithms, etc. — while they have no problem ignoring the part of the application code base that is actually exposed to and open for the rest of the world to see. Way too often, too little effort is put into making the front-end code as good as that of the back-end systems. In my opinion, both things are equally important. </rant>.

Although the title of this blog post might seem a tad ironic in that there is not much semantics to HTML or XHTML, I do feel like writing a little piece about how to correctly use (X)HTML.

Hopefully, it might help you understand that even valid (X)HTML can be bad (X)HTML, and that — and how — semantic HTML may help improve your site’s usability, accessibility and search engine ranking. Whether you’re developing for a commercial site or not, these factors should be of interest. They certainly are to your end-users. (more…)