Here’s a Rap (or Hip-Hop) song that all about following web standards, and search engine optimization (SEO).
It’s called “Design Coding”
Here’s an excerpt from the lyrics…
make it easy for the spiders to crawl what you provide
remove font type, font color and font size
no background colors, keep your coding real neat
tag your look and feel on a separate style sheet
better results with xml and css
now you making progress, a lil closer to success
describe your doctype so the browser can relate
make sure you do it great or it won’t validate
check in all browsers, I do it directly
gotta make sure that it renders correctly
Boy am I on a goose chase today… and I hope I catch the one that lays the golden eggs! This research about CSS lead me over to Big John Gallant and Alex Robinson and the Position Is Everything website. Big John has a link over to a tool that generates a layout based on what you want and how you specify it. Alex and John talk about a lot of CSS bugs, and quirks in various browsers, as well as pitfalls to avoid as you continue in Search of the One True Layout.
Mark Newhouse has a nice three column layout (CSS and html design pattern) that also iplements a header and footer. (Wow - looks like he wrote this article back in 2002.) I have been doing layouts like this for years with tables, inside of tables, inside of tables… (Sounds like I am confessing my sins again — for not following web standards.) With the advent of Firefox 1.5, Opera 9, MS-IE 7, and NN7 - these things are changing.
Mark has not updated his Real World Style blog since May 5, 2005 — but as of this writing, most of the material is way ahead of where most people are at anyway.
Hey, a bunch of you lurkers are laughing at me, but when are you going to update your old web pages that have all that crufty old html junk, styles, and design patterns from 1995?