People Ask Questions
There was a question in comments about “Netiquette” that I thought needed to be addressed because people seem more than a little confused. The topic is covered by RFC 1855 which predates the use of HTTP, the “World Wide Web”. [The World Wide Web is a segment of the Internet, not its entirety. It is one of about two dozen protocols that are used on the network.]
As the question was about an HTML page, the authoritative answer would have to come from W3.org and their Mark-up Language standards.
The problem is the question was really about “style” and not function, and there is no widely accepted manual of style for Web pages. Actually, that really is one of the points of the Web, you can “do your own thing”.
I like serif fonts for readability and use a larger font size than many sites for the same reason. I don’t embed video because that slows down the loading of this site, and you are better off going to the original site to view a video, rather than having it downloaded to this site, and then to you. Besides, some people are still using dial-up and they don’t need the aggravation.
Whenever appropriate I credit graphics that I use. If you don’t see a credit, it would be because I created or license the graphic. The only time I use graphics from another site in this one without hosting them myself is everything from I Can Has Cheezburger?, because that is their policy, but my view is that it steals their bandwidth without giving their site a click-through.
On my site, I use my “style manual”, just like most of the independents on the Internet [a trademark and always capitalized, BTW]. I pay for the privilege of not having to accept other people’s “Terms of Service”.
5 comments
…I don’t embed graphics – in particular YouTube – because all those blessedly behind-me-now years of dial-up taught me that I couldn’t open them up to decide to embed them in any case. Of course, that is not to mention the fact that I know for a fact that there are (shall we say) places where a YouTube embed will only show up as a large blank green space, and I just couldn’t do that to whoever it is from the US Senate Sargent at Arms office that comes by every time I include a Senator’s name in a post…
I supposedly have high speed access, but doing anything except clicking through to YouTube yields terrible results.
What happens is that the users starts the process on site where it is embedded, and first it is downloaded to that site, and then it is sent to the end point. There are a lot of blogs sitting on servers that just don’t handle streaming media very well.
In my case I would be paying bandwidth charges for downloading to my site and then uploading to the visitor. It isn’t a lot of money, but why tie up the ‘Net twice by relaying it?
I was on dialup until Nov last year, so lean and mean was good for me! 🙂 Now I have ADSL2+ ANNEX M (17.8Mbps UL/2.2Mbps DL) (On a side note… WHY do almost everyone who writes speeds use a small ‘m’ for Mega? The standard is a capitol ‘M’! Small ‘m’ is mili… Speaking of standards! Sheesh.)
I don’t like flash and embedded media for many reasons, one being there are no standards for it as yet, and many browsers roll their own (incompatible) additions to the HTML 4 standard and have not (and will not be) ratified.
There are many ‘style guides’ around, some much better than others. 🙂 But as you say, no standards (I doubt there ever will be!) I tend to stick with the W3C style guidelines as my base, especially for ‘Accessibility’, but there are others also. I generally use strict XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2 (for now), and I’m keeping an eye on XHTML 2 and HTML 5 developments. I love standards! Especially the way they change! LOL
To me, accessibility to a broad audience, and ease of use are key. Of course, site design depends on the target audience, and many site designers fail to properly identify that target, it’s an art. Asking questions, and knowing what questions to ask, is a start. 😉 🙂
Yes, remember when blinking text was all the rage?
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I pay attention to Accessibility because I spent a few years rehabbing hardware that was donated to people with disabilities, so they could get on-line, because this area is not exactly ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliant and things, like shopping, were nearly impossible for some people.
It was annoying that the first web site I had to rewrite belonged to the non-profit. It was a disaster and unusable by a “reader”. It was all graphics, most of them in motion, and too much of the text was blinking. I flat told them it had to be the number site on the web for generating a migraine or an grand mal seizure.
There are tools for verifying accessibility and standards compliance, but if you don’t hand code you can’t be sure.
I had to pull the countdown clocks on the sidebar because IE doesn’t deal with Javascript in a sane manner, mostly because they use their version of Javascript which isn’t standard.
Standards are nice, and the Internet certainly supplies a wide variety to choose from 😈