19th january 2006

"standards - schmandards! we have sport!"

you know what makes me angry? no? ill tell you... espn - the worldwide leader in sports - have just relaunched their new home page, "streamlining (their) navigation to better organise the most comprehensive sports content on the Web". now you would think that such a major site, with so much money behind them, and the site that gives the most "comprehensive sports content on the Web" would have heard - and have the quality of developers, or at the very least the budget to hire them - about such crazy ideas as standards compliance and accessibility. but no.

i just can't understand how a site as big as this can be happy with producing over 1900 - yes, i said 1900 - errors when their homepage code is passed through the w3 markup validator. why use an xhtml 1.0 transitional doctype if you're gonna completely ignore it's rules? turning the css off produces a list of almost 350 links - and nothing else - before we get to anything that even resembles 'content'. and you've then got a good few full turns on your scroll wheel before we get to the day's 'main story'. so they must have various 'skip' links then? nope.

it just amazes me that, in 2006, such large, popular, important sites can still get away with this. espn, if you're reading this (yeah, right), you need to hire me. espn developers, using "div" instead of "table" does not a quality-built site make.

if you like, you can take a look at this crap.

related:

rant,

sites,

standards,

web dev