Thanks for the critique, have a couple more q's [Archive]

cseigel

07-18-2008, 04:09 PM

Thanks everyone, you have been a great help.

Earlier I posted my site here for a critique (www.workriver.com) and afterwords I changed the following: Logo, added mouseovers on important links, fixed the order of the ads by date posted. I know it still needs work on the colors and layout but im not really sure where to start there, or if i should just rebuild that from scratch.

Here is my question though: you guys mentioned that it was important for me to add a doctype. Is there a program (preferably free) that you know of that can go through my document and tell me which tags are outdated, and which ones are missing the < /> part? Most of it is all php echo "<html code>" so I would need something preferably that could ignore that and only fix the html/xhtml.

Im worried that if I add a doctype now, it would make it unreadable since its not currently up-to-date xhtml/html

Declan1991

07-20-2008, 12:36 PM

I would suggest that you start again with semantic HTML, and a doctype. I would suggest HTML 4.01, and always validate (http://validator.w3.org/) your HTML.

I only did the top of it, but this shows how you can use the proper tags for your HTML.<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title></title>
<style type="text/css">
body {
text-align:center;
}
body * {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
#page {
width:1000px;
text-align:left;
margin:auto;
}
#header {
text-align:center;
background:#bcf url(http://www.workriver.com/newLogo.jpg) no-repeat center center;
text-indent:-10000px;
height:112px;
}
#nav {
background-color:#f3f0e7;
height:30px;
margin:3px;
}
#nav li {
float:left;
}
#nav div {
float:right;
}
#nav li {
display:block;
margin:0 8px;
}
</style>
</head>

<body>
<div id="page">
<h1 id="header">Workriver Free Classified</h1>
<div id="nav">
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>Partners</li>
<li>Contacts</li>
</ul>
<div>
<form action="http://www.google.com/cse" id="cse-search-box" target="_blank">
<input type="hidden" name="cx" value="partner-pub-1877550394192713:8h8qwx-r9g6" />
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1" />
<input type="text" name="q" size="31" />
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
</form>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en"></script>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>If you were putting that code online, you'd remove the style to an external style sheet, and remove as much whitespace as you could.