13 11/2007 The new 'cutting edge' Ch7 Sunrise website, standards not worth the effort?

As a regular viewer of Channel 7’s ‘Sunrise’ breakfast show I was interested this morning when they roped in Pete Blasina to run through their new and supposedly ‘cutting edge’ website and tell us how great it is. Just incase we didnt get the message, Kochie as he’s best known must have mentioned the site at least two dozen times across the course of the show…

Graphically the site isnt the worst I’ve seen though its not the best either and is extremely cluttered and disorganised. It almost looks as though they made a list of features they needed to include then threw them at a magnetic board. The site’s plenty interactive and as they say has plenty of video. For avid standardistas however, the problem is an all too familiar one. The site is laden with inline javascript, fails HTML & CSS validation – the home page alone registering no fewer than 45 errors – even whilst running HTML4.01 Transitional. I mean seriously, how hard could it be to meet validation for HTML4?

The story gets worse once we start looking at accessibility, failing to provide text equivalents for non-text elements such as images, inclusion of deprecated elements such as inline alignment attributes, link targets not clearly identified and then the forms… where do we start?

I suppose at least the tables are gone but they’ve simply been replaced with an absolute mass of div’s, divitis in full effect here.

My favourite part is this ‘new’ technique for hiding CSS from IE, by using comments – not conditional comments, just plain vanilla comments in the css as follows;

/* Hides from IE */
* html .clearfix {height: 1%;}
/* End hide from IE */


Interesting… particularly when you consider that the star html hack is actually used to target IE, but I digress and minor css inexperience is hardly the main problem here.

In all fairness its no worse an effort than most and heading tags have been used (thought they did skip the h1) but in this day, sporting Yahoo livery, a major television channel and claiming the site to be ‘cutting edge’ surely they could have made a better effort than this? Shame, shame, shame