Comments on: Less Than Perfect

By: Andy Pemberton

Andy Pemberton — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:03:42 +0000

These always get me:
- onclick=”javascript:someFunction();”
- a href=”javascript:window.location(someUrl)”

Speaking of, Nate – I had a related question for you related to fonts.css. I’m curious why you prefer to use the *property selector as a CSS filter for IE, rather than using IE’s conditional comment mechanism?

There’s been a lot of debate about Conditional Comments, CSS hacks/filters, and the like – and just was curious about your opinion.

-AP

By: Beth

Beth — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:56:10 +0000

-1 for using spacer gifs
-1 for smart quotes
-2 for excessively large images
-1 for using the same title on every page of the site
-1 for missing shorthand opportunities like:

.foo{
margin-top:10px;
margin-right:10px;
margin-bottom:10px;
margin-left:10px;
}

By: Adam Burmister

Adam Burmister — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:04:50 +0000

@Ryan:

I don’t think you should be subtracting for onclick’s on elements, especially for high performance sites. Attaching at DOM0 will always be faster than attaching to elements unobtrusively. While it’s idealistic, it’s not always practical.

Also, putting limits on JS files isn’t always going to be a great idea. While you’ll gain performance with less HTTP requests by concatenating your JS files, you also run a risk of hitting an error in your JS file; and when that error is hit it means the rest of your JS file won’t be parsed and won’t run. It’s a bit of a balancing act.

@Nate: Good idea though, you should post a follow up list.
-1 for no print stylesheet
… also I have a pet peve of blah

By: ppk

ppk — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:44:33 +0000

Oops. Last line should read

counts as empty.

By: ppk

ppk — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:42:57 +0000

Here’s the two rules I thought of while sitting in the Y! cubicle:

Check CSS for any occurrence of position or float. If they’re not there, the site uses table layout. (If they ARE there, the site might till use tables, though).

Check for empty elements. ( counts as empty)

By: john

john — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 02:50:13 +0000

* 2nd on Dennis’s recommendation that requiring cookies is a problem — and ideally, the product would rewrite all URLs . . .

* All functionality show be exposed without requiring JavaScript…

By: jim g

jim g — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:17:22 +0000

Maybe this is an obvious one and/or slightly off topic from this discussion, but I spent a lot of my early career maintaining templating systems designed to deal with these sorts of issues: It really bugs me when a website doesn’t have consistent headers/footers/navigation. Many websites out there still think of (and build) their site as a “collection of discreet pages” instead of a _homogeneous system_ that interacts as such. As a result, it’s pretty obvious when a website uses, for example, a cut-&-pasted header on multiple pages where the copies end up getting out of sync over time. This is obviously bad from a coding standpoint, but more significantly results in a negative and sometimes jarring user experience.

By: Dennis Kehrig

Dennis Kehrig — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:39:50 +0000

- Using GET (as in links) to initiate a state change (as in delete or even logout)
- Requiring cookies
- Trying to forbid to view the page source

By: Asbjørn Ulsberg

Asbjørn Ulsberg — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 07:58:51 +0000

Additional stuff I’d like to see on that list (in random order):

1. ‘href=”javascript:*”‘
2. Any transitional (like ‘font’, ‘bgcolor’, ‘target’, etc) markup.
3. Any ‘*frame’ element in the markup.
4. Transitional DOCTYPE.
5. Frameset DOCTYPE.
5. Huge lumps of inline JavaScript (should be shoved out to its own .js file)
6. Use of ‘document.write()’.
7. Use of ‘window.open()’.

By: Nate Koechley

Nate Koechley — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 16:34:12 +0000

@Ryan – great list. All of those belong on the final list.

@Gopal – thanks especially for the same-link-color one. While bordering on design, it’s important and sometime the result of poorly ordered CSS rules.

@Garrett – thanks for the “additive” word, that’s exactly right.

@Anup – great idea to make a tool of it. I’ll definitely consider that, or perhaps once I publish the list maybe somebody in the wild can take a crack at it.

@ Mr. Clark – solid advice to keep it lean. Thanks for that.

@Aaron – very good point, and some clever suggestions there for how to create a more viable test.

Thanks everybody! I’m glad you liked this idea, and I thank you all for your input. I’ll be writing more about this, so stay tuned and lets keep the converstation going.

thanks,
nate