Please Check My Site (But not the validation, it wont validate if you try!)

1. very nasty validation errors.

2. your menu hover state's text color is black. Needs more contrast being over the wood grain background.

3. Not SEO or ADA friendly

4. the OS/Browser sniffer is not a good idea, but you already know this from a previous thread.

5. Your menu should be a ul list, not a bunch of divs. research the term divitis.

6. inline styles are a big no-no. CSS was created to separate design from markup. There is absolutely no reason for inline styles.

7. all your links should have a title.

8. the page curl graphic is a little choppy, not good quality.

9. this may not be a huge deal, but the background image size is is a tad too big. its like 121K.

10. the design of the site, no offense, looks childish. You are promoting yourself as web developer/designer, you may want something that looks more professional. This works for a middle-school website, at best.

please dont take these words the wrong way, but i feel sometimes people need to hear (or read) the truth without sugar-coating. It helps us grow!

1. very nasty validation errors.

2. your menu hover state's text color is black. Needs more contrast being over the wood grain background.

3. Not SEO or ADA friendly

4. the OS/Browser sniffer is not a good idea, but you already know this from a previous thread.

5. Your menu should be a ul list, not a bunch of divs. research the term divitis.

6. inline styles are a big no-no. CSS was created to separate design from markup. There is absolutely no reason for inline styles.

7. all your links should have a title.

8. the page curl graphic is a little choppy, not good quality.

9. this may not be a huge deal, but the background image size is is a tad too big. its like 121K.

10. the design of the site, no offense, looks childish. You are promoting yourself as web developer/designer, you may want something that looks more professional. This works for a middle-school website, at best.

please dont take these words the wrong way, but i feel sometimes people need to hear (or read) the truth without sugar-coating. It helps us grow!

1. I know, it needs sorting

2. I agree here, any idea what color I could use, whilst inkeeping with the sites color scheme.

3. I have been looking in to this. By this do you mean my lack of META tags?

4. Yeah I have my own views on this topic!

5. I have always been taught to use the divs and sway away from ul, I may look into it though.

6. I know this, and have actually commented against this sort of use before, its just laziness on my part, and will be sorted soon.

7. ok

8. I had noticed this, need to work on improving it.

9. It is big, but I have tested and the load-time is fast throughout the board, it is necessary to cover the screen resolutions on Mac computers.

10. I am not claiming to be a designer! I can see what you mean, the fact I have used a desk effect for the background is possibly swaying you into this view as well. My design skills do need work.

Finally, no offence taken at all. The last thing I wanted was to get replies saying it was perfect. All critisism is positive in my view.

No you should be validating as you work, don't make this fundamental error, the only use validating has is to warn you of issues so that you can correct them before moving on. Unless they are really really trivial they can effect how things display and therefore have an impact on what might be considered as errors brought here for us to look into, which is why we expressly state that people are not to post without first bringing clean code to the forum.

Daniel where is your DTD?

Font tags are deprecated they are no longer used whatsoever

These are honestly two things that should NOT be brought to our attention, *wags finger*

META tags are a big part of it. Do some research on the term "SEO".

"Sorting" your html for validity must be done as you write it. Leaving validation to "later" is totally sloppy and unprofessional, and not an accepted practice on this forum. Fix it first before anything else. There is no acceptable excuse for posting invalid html to this forum.

I must hear them then. Let's have it.

I don't enjoy your tone, and won't get involved in a petty argument. However, I will direct you to this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_sniffing

I will admit it has its disadvantages, but, in reply to one of your earlier posts on a different thread, I prefer the term "definitely work" to "fail gracefully" if I am completely honest.

Stop being a slave to the CSS Gods!

Perhaps I am at the wrong forum.

Relax.

That's just it, it doesn't "definitely work". It never has.

Yes, I think you are, and that you should try to find a forum where people are as out of touch with reality as you and will tell you that what you think is right even when it isn't. That's certainly not this forum.

Okay, everybody needs to calm down, and be aware that the words we use can set a tone that could be offensive. We should choose our word wisely as to not put anybody on the defense.

Hardy has an opinion about browser-sniffing. he has the right. We too have an opinion that is different. Lets not force him to conform to our ways, but offer productive guidance in a friendly helpful manner. After both opinions have been heard, leave it at that and allow both parties decide for themselves what road to follow. Lets not get into a pissing content here. Ive been known in the past to partake in such a contest, and have learned that nothing good comes from them.

Very well said toejam

Also I took your comments about the design on board and I am now giving the site a complete re-vamp, that will also validate!

Just to try to work it out, there was no intended "tone" in my post. I enjoy talking about standards and why they are in place. Nothing more. If you have a valid reason for doing something, I'd really like to hear all about it.

Just saying: When I use Opera, I get to choose the rendering engine that it uses... so browser sniffing never truly works for the browser intended.

You can do the same with Safari.

I don't know about choosing the rendering engine; Konqueror Epiphany is the only browser I was aware of that could do that (Gecko or Webkit). You can, however, select which browser to report as your actual browser's identity in just about all except IE*. In other words, your browser can lie about who it is.

cheers,

gary

* Until recently, Opera defaulted to identifying itself as IE.

I have come up with a more friendly solution (I think)

Instead of redirecting to a special style-sheet, i can simply define a seperate element within the existing style sheet.

Code Similar to :

* + html #topbar {
width:1000px;
height:78px;
float:left;
 
}

The code is fully validated and should solve the rendering issue too.

Actually, I wouldn't unless the title adds something useful.

Well, wait, you did mean the title attribute, right?
Not only may it make lots of unnecessary noise/babble in a screen reader IF that reader is set to read out titles in anchors,
but also the tooltips can be unhelpfully covering up the anchor text (esp bad in dropdowns as can be seen on Jakob Nielsen's alertbox column regarding Mega Dropdown, there's a nice screenshot of a tooltip getting nicely in the way).

That is much more awesome (and works better) than explicit browser detection... because, just as recommended with Javascript, you're doing there "feature detection" (though *+html isn't really a "feature" lawlz) like "object detection" in JS.

I think ppk's article about browser sniffing holds fairly well to browser sniffing for CSS as well. It at least explains when browser sniffing can get you in trouble (he doesn't mention it because the article is too old, but Opera 10 is getting hit hard by sniffers who were written so long ago, they can't recognize a 2-digit browser version, and think Opera 10 is Opera 1!).