Good Code Bad Code? Who decides?

Since code is a language that’s read by computers, shouldn’t it have rules just like spoken languages do? That’s where compliance and a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) come in. They created a list of dos and don’ts for writing web pages.

As a company, what are you doing to make sure the rules are followed?

In addition to the w3c guidelines, there’s some additional steps that I’ve taken to ensure websites I create are future-proof or “sustainable”. I have done three things:

1. Eliminated the “table” and “img” tags.

   Even though these tags are considered valid, tables hide their content from Google and screen readers for the blind. img tags are simply images, they have no business acting as layout elements since it would require modifying the original HTML to change a site’s look.

2. Refrain from using “image swap” javascript.

   This is code that exchanges one image for another when you mouse over it. The same effect can be achieved with one background image and three lines of CSS.

3. Organized css.

   Since many of our sites use wordpress, there is no need to hard-code (link to files directly in code) CSS files into a page. Instead, we use the “@import” technique for including additional CSS files