Site Administration
Frank Ralf (talk | contribs) |
Frank Ralf (talk | contribs) |
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* No empty (null) ALT attributes for images without meaning | * No empty (null) ALT attributes for images without meaning | ||
* Superfluous class of "link" for <nowiki><a></nowiki> tags. | * Superfluous class of "link" for <nowiki><a></nowiki> tags. | ||
* | * "Skip navigation" link is good practice for accessibility. | ||
Revision as of 14:11, 18 May 2009
A after posting "Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to… Hell?" and starting a discussion on "Semantic DIV IDs?" I think it is worth digging deeper into this topic.
talk -- Frank
Anatomy of Site Admin Block
This is the original code for the Site Admin block plus some additional HTML to make the code valid and viewable in a browser. (For the time being all examples are only tested using Firefox 3.)
This is a static HTML snapshot, created by using the browser's "Save page as..." function. The code, including the necessary CSS and image files, is available here: Site_Administration_2-0_Open_3.zip.
Screenshot of original block
The Site Admin menu block should look like this:
Original block with CSS turned off
And so the block looks with CSS turned off. Note that the nesting of the menu is gone.
The original code
<html>
<head>
<title>Site Administration - Open</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css"></link>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles_002.css"></link>
</head>
<body >
Moodle 2.0 - Site Administration (open) - Original Code
</body>
</html>
Dissection: The good, the bad, and the ugly
<a href="#sb-1" class="skip-block">Skip Site Administration</a>
<a href="#" name="d1">
<img id="vh_div1indicator" src="pix/closed.gif" alt="Closed folder">
Users</a>
<a class="link" href="admin/settings.php?section=themesettings">
<img src="pix/item.gif" alt="">
Theme settings</a>
- Table with inline styles
- No use of nested lists (semantic HTML)
- No semantic ids
- Repetitive information in "name" and "id" attributes ("name" should be replaced by "id" in XHMTL, see http://www.w3schools.com/Xhtml/xhtml_syntax.asp) probably only kept for backward compatability
- Empty (unnecessary) <span> tags
- Inline images instead of list markers or background images via CSS
- No empty (null) ALT attributes for images without meaning
- Superfluous class of "link" for <a> tags.
- "Skip navigation" link is good practice for accessibility.
Some general rules of thumb
- DIV and SPAN are generic (block and inline) elements with no semantic meaning.
- As such they should be used as sparsely as possible.
- There's no need to wrap single elements in DIV or SPAN tags:
Example: Title
Site Administration
This could be reduced to
Site Administration
with attaching the class directly to the H2 tag (which already is a block element).
And as long as the Header DIV only contains one element this could very well be stripped down to
Site Administration
as the class "title" doesn't enhance the semantics of a H2 heading or perhaps to
Site Administration
which would provide the context (Header) for the H2 heading.
Example: Search form
The same goes for the search form in the footer. FORM is also already a block element therefore no additional DIV is needed:
Instead of
<form action="http://admin/search.php" method="get">
you could write:
<form class="adminsearchform" action="http://admin/search.php" method="get">
The modified code: "Look Ma, (nearly) no DIVs!"
[TODO]
Here will be demonstrated how the code could be improved without changing it's rendition.
Further resources
- Sitemap example using lists with no DIVs at all from "Webdesign mit CSS", 2. Auflage, chapter 11
- "Table Layouts vs. Div Layouts: From Hell to… Hell?" from Smashing Magazine, quote:
- "The div tag is a block-level element that defines a section within a document. Divs are thus suitable for building the structure of Web pages. The div tag is also used to describe content that cannot be properly described by other more semantic tags. When developers do not understand the semantic meaning of other block-level elements, they often add more div tags than are needed."
- Designing with Web Standards, 2nd ed. by Jeffrey Zeldman is the best resource for creating standard conform, lean HTML.
See also
- Semantic HTML
- CSS FAQ
- How to Develop with CSS
- Prototyping with XHTML from Boxes and Arrows