I of course appreciate it when a newspaper that invests a billion bucks into printing presses and glossy stock trumpets its new mobile Web site. The blog version of such trumpeting makes a smashing case for the Globe and Mail’s new mobile site. The actual mobile version of the same announcement raises a number of questions about its source code, which I posed to the trumpeter, Greg MacGregor:
I’m really not clear why your new mobile site can’t even bother to declare
<doctype HTML>or its human language, or use real links (href="#"means nothing), or use analttext that isn’t"img", or use the CSS cascade instead of malarkey likeclass="serif fontsmall menuitem gbb", or heading elements.In short, how is your mobile site new and improved if it doesn’t really even have HTML?
My esteemed colleague should very much know better than to claim “[c]ritiquing is a force for productive good if it’s done to better a product, but not when it’s used only to point out the faults.” If your newspaper is trying to convince us its new mobile site is an improvement, please actually improve it.
Kooky fun fact! The Globe homepage lead us to believe that h1 h3 h4 h6 is a permissible heading sequence.