POSHify your website
I wrote this post a while back. The content can still be relevant but the information I've linked to may not be available.
I came across the term POSH recently and discovered the POSH home page. This seems to be a 'subgroup' of the 'web standards movement' and is the basis from which microformats are built.
Initiatives like this are good because they encourage the use of higher standards and better semantics in the creation of websites. I certainly support it. However, I am of the general opinion that there will always be some poorly coded websites because of the everyman nature of the web. There will always be websites that are built by the 'common man' using simple website creator tools. These tend to produce poor code in some cases. The tools need to change I guess.
The first rule of POSH is that you must validate your POSH.
It is also difficult to POSHify your website when third party code uses tables and other poor code standards. The 'first rule of POSH' is that you must validate your POSH. Validating this page for example gives me a load of errors that are mostly generated by the Flickr badge. Some of the errors may be minor (and they do not cause page display problems) but they are errors, nonetheless. I am just not sure what the best solution is here. Contact the Flickr tech team?
I don't mean to be 'negative'. Just pragmatic. Just to repeat, I do support POSH and I intend to do what I can with my own code - and keep aware of the latest development in this area. I'd encourage all website authors to do the same.
Comments
24 Apr 2007 07:22:53
And I agree with you. The noise to signal ratio does tend to be high in certain quarters.
However, the laws of nature apply here, and those ‘nonconformist’ websites have a much lower meantime to failure in world that is increasingly dominated by the need to adhere to standards.
When you have the likes of Amazon finally giving a nod towards web standards, you know that times are changing…
01 Jun 2007 10:07:31
I think you are right to be ‘negative’. I’ve just read on the HTML5 working group mailing list a serious discussion about why tables should be allowed inside p tags (and there are many similarly daft suggestions). I was horrified but it reminded me how small a band of standards advocates we really are in the grand scheme of web site creation. I’m all for this new, if silly acronym – I do think and hope that it will help push awareness of one of the most fundameltally important aspects of web design.
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