This list was created on a rainy Sunday afternoon when I decided to do something about my sites. Provoked by some errors and incompatibilities I found I decided to make a collection of tools that will help anyone check their website. It begun with a pretty decent list of website tools found at aviva directory, which I then researched one by one, and added some of my own favorites. So that is how Webmaster Essentials Checklist came to life. Hope you find it useful and share it on.
1) Not bad, but I usually do the math in my head. 2) or you could just write clean minimalist CSS in the first place. Good habit to pick up instead of relying on some tool. 3 & 4) Agreed wholeheartedly, even if I do ignore certain errors and warnings in the CSS validator because I know what they are and why to ignore them. (ooh look, I declared a background color without explicitly declaring a new color! **** that) 5) I disagree with most of TAW3's analysis of pages for the simple reason it balks over stupid stuff that is NEEDED for most graphical layouts - empty spans and divs, layered wrapping div's, etc. I find it's 'advice' more hindrance than useful... it's repeated bitching about fixed units of measure for example is utter nonsense if you are working with images, especially for things like borders. It's crap. 6) Wave is 'cute', but frankly if you can't tell the structure by looking at the HTML itself, you need a Nun to smack you a few times on the knuckles screaming "INDENT" and "DEINDENT" in your ear. 7) cute for static shots WHEN they actually render right, but frankly unneeded and unreliable given one should actually be testing in the actual BROWSERS - Windows users now have no excuse not to be able to run ALL the browsers, and intel based Mac users don't have much excuse either since they can run XP under parallels. A SERIOUS developer should be testing in the actual browser, not relying on some outdated online service... if for no other reason than to check your changes in realtime, instead of sitting around with your thumb up your tuckus waiting for browsershots to update. When I code, I write a section, alt-tab to each browser and refresh to see it, then revise if needed, otherwise lather, rinse, repeat. With browsershots that would take too damned long. 8) I would agree with this one - moving towards mobile devices is the future. Too bad the site locks up every browser I have solid. 9) Now this is useful because it shows exactly how much overhead there really is BEFORE the client starts recieving data. It's not 'AS' useful becuase that overhead changes by connection type - so if you are on dialup and halfway around the world you could be looking at a second or two handshaking, while broadband on the same trunk you could be looking at under 100ms. Still, it's a good visual representation of what's really going on. 10) I like this one - you have to take it with a grain of salt because language itself is highly subjective, but it is useful to see if you are aiming over your audience's head, or rambling in baby talk. 'copy' is one of if not THE most important things on a website, and for a lot of pages is usually the LAST concern. Poorly worded, bad grammar, single incomplete sentences as standouts - doesn't inspire confidence in whatever wares the site is trying to hock. I'm actually surprised by that last one's results in a lot of cases as I have repeatedly had people say I talk over their heads - both in terms of verbosity (I'm long winded), uncommon words and multi-syllable - Yet everything I do rates a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 6 or below... Says a lot for the current educational system.
4) google.com has more than 30 errors as you say. Add a XHTML Strict doctype to google, then try validating it, from what I remember it's more in the range of 300 the last time I checked.
Well, first remember google is pretty much HTML 3 territory because A> they've been around long enough that web standards means SHIT to them, and B> they want to be backwards compatable to EVERYTHING. Besides, you want quality coding you do NOT look to google - inlined CSS, inlined Script, inlined presentation - another page that has more of 1997 about it than 2007... and that's before you get into the javascript HELL that is crap like gMail or their other 'services'. Seriously, am I the only one who sees things like: body,td,a,p,.h{font-family:arial,sans-serif} or .h{font-size:20px}.h{color:#3366cc} or even BETTER (I reformatted it for legibility) #gbh { border-top:1px solid #c9d7f1; font-size:0; height:0; position:absolute; right:0; top:24px; width:200%; } and goes "What the **** are they smoking?" It's bad when I'm willing to bet I could take their current bandwidth use and HALVE it. Seriously, they must delete all the spacing, tabs and carriage returns NOT to save bandwidth, but to try and hide how bad their code is.
Yeah I know. I had to validate it as a task in class one day last year. Wasn't too bad really, just repeating the same error over and over. Also had tags I had no idea what they were in there (think there was <nobr> and I just looked at it funny and took it out). But anyway they are google, do you think they care about validating? Nope. Not unless it'll save them money, which is questionable if it will decrese their filesize's and thus decrease their bandwidth.
Deathshadow, I would agree to almost everything you said if I was a web designer like yourself, but remember that the article was geared more towards people that just want to check their site and fix some errors. So we need tools like CleanCss to do all the dirty job for us, and WAVE to tell us where our h2 and h3 headings are. It's just he way it is