Marv\'s Blog

Annoyed at the thing I have to get taught at University.

Aside from restructuring into semantic (X)HTML, this post appears as it does in the post I made on the Uni message board. Damn WebCT sucks.

obsolete/incorrect info in session 10 power point presentation

I am annoyed and frustrated about being taught obsolete and semantically incorrect techniques.

1. Frames generally create accessibility, as well as usability problems; they should be avoided, and if scrolling content is needed, div tags with the overflow specified in CSS will fix that problem.
2. Styles should be applied to tables with CSS, not (X)HTML attributes.
3. Internet Explorer uses an invalid DOM.
4. div and span tags aren’t so much layers as blank elements intended to be styled by the designer or end user. span tags can be made into block level elements and div tags can be made into inline elements, as can pretty much every other (X)HTML element.
5. Since IE uses an invalid DOM, code should be written for everything else (the stuff thats standard based) first, and IE second. Or just Firefox, as IE is a big obsolete waste of time.
6. Layers and Tables do not reduce the accesibility of web pages to visualy impaired users. It is the incompetent implementation of layers and tables that makes them inaccessible.
7. Tables should not be used to control layout of a document. That’s a waste of code and creates accessibility problems, unless you know what you’re doing. Then it’s just a waste of code.
8. Nested layers are good, nested tables are really, really bad.
9. CSS permits user defined formating of any XML object.
10. CSS can be applied to ANY (X)HTML object
11. CSS files do not have to be stored with a .CSS extension. Web browsers couldn’t care less what it’s called as long as it is written in CSS. Preferably valid. Preferably without IE’s invalid bloat.
12. Fixed pixel fonts should never be used. They are inaccesible, and should only ever ever be used if the design of a page requires it, in which case, alternate stylesheets should be provided. Many websites do this out of courtesy for their users. IE’s text zoom facilities suck. That is a syntacticalyl correct statement.
13. CSS is not a dynamic language, it does not update all pages it is associated with, the changes are only reflected once the relevant pages have been refreshed in the browser.
14. Most of Macromedia’s DHTML implementations create invalid javascript code.