I’ve just read through the validation tests that Pete McVicar put the NetGuide 2007 Web wards finalists through. Just one site passed both the valid HTML and CSS tests – Public Address. Pete criticises TradeMe for their use of tables for layout and Rowan responded with his own comments. I commented on Rowan’s site that there are a couple of tables that could be replaced with divs, but that tables should still be used for displaying the listings and search results.
This also prompted me to revalidate my own site and I discovered that my earlier post about the iTunes pricing was causing this site to fail validation. I had used Google Spreadsheets to analyse some data and produce a chart, and to embed the spreadsheet into your site, Google provides a snippet of HTML using the <iframe> tag. Turns out the <iframe> tag has been deprecated in XHTML 1.1 which is what the DOCTYPE of this site was using. After a bit of research, I found that the replacement for the <iframe> was to use the <object> tag instead.
So the original code is:
<iframe src="anotherpage.html"></iframe>
and with the <object> tag it becomes:
<object data="anotherpage.html" type="text/html"></object>
I feel good that this site conforms to the XHTML and CSS standards even though it is a bit more effort to do so – but I think it’s worth it.
