Belmont Webmaster's Journal

That is harsh. But before anyone gets their feelings hurt, there are tons of people who create web pages every day (who claim expertise in the area) who are guilty of creating code that doesn't meet current HTML standards (yes, Virginia, as shocking as that sounds...there ARE standards). I will admit my guilt to taking short cuts and liberties with code and not always keeping up with all things new and deprecated over at the W3C... I know better and that is the reason that I hesitate to jump on my friends and colleagues here at the university when I stumble on a mess in their source code.

<rant> Actually, it is quite easy to create non-compliant HTML code and still have your web pages appear in some form or fashion in a browser (thanks to browser world's failure to agree upon standards). Perhaps my favorite (bad) example is the feature in Microsoft Word that allows an individual to save a text document in HTML format. The Macromedia Dreamweaver people recognized this problem and include a "Clean up Word HTML" feature in their tool bar...that should say enough. </rant>

So why the rant and the No Font Tag graphic? We are moving thousands of HTML documents into a new system that balks every time it encounters a page with significant errors (and non-compliant code) in the HTML ...someone has to clean up the code before integrating it into the new content management system...and guess who is included on that list of someones? As it turns out, one of our favorite HTML tags, the font tag, is deprecated in HTML v4.01 (insert big sigh here).... Thusfar, the record for the most font tags in a single HTML document that I have found during our transition is 716. There should be a trophy...reallly!

I'm through whining...and I feel so much better...full disclosure: this post includes non-compliant code *grin*