As I said my previous post, I’m going to write brief reviews on some of Saudi Arabia’s leading companies’ websites. I’m planning to keep it short yet meaningful, so instead of actually writing a long review on each one, I’m going to test each one by going through the following five checks:

Code inspection:

A quick look behind the scenes to determine the quality of the code, and detect some of the horrifying errors.

Cross-browser look & feel

How a website looks and functions in standard compliant and non-standard compliant browsers. I’m going to use Mozilla FireFox to represent standard-compliant browsers, and Internet Explorer to represent….well…itself.

Cross-resolution compatibility:

How a site looks in different screen resolutions.

Replace images with ‘alt’ attribute:

A web site’s images might fail to load for any reason. This test will show how usable a web site is without its images. I’m going to use FireFox’s web developer toolbar extension to perform this test.

Document size:

How dialup-friendly a web site is (since the majority here are still using dial-up or slow ADSL connections).

Overall:

How well does the site perform overall.

I picked those because they don’t only concern Web Developers, they concern end-users as well (except the first). I’m also pretty confident that none of the sites I’m going to feature are going to be standard-compliant nor use valid/cross-browser codes, so there’s no reason to include any standard compliancy or code validation tests.

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In my country, Saudi Arabia, there is almost no single company that considers web standards when designing their Web Sites. I’ve met a few people responsible for different corporate sites, and some of them weren’t convinced just yet. They think that it’s just an extra step, or a new fad that will fade away soon. And that what really matters is making a Web Site that just works.

After having a few conversations with local web coders/designers, I’ve concluded that they refuse to switch for the following reasons:

1. More than 50% of them think that the only web browser out there is Internet Explorer (seriously), which leads to excessive use of propriety code.
2. Recruiters, when seeking web designers, will require FrontPage 2003 (or Dream weaver MX) experience instead of asking for what really matters.
3. Many (if not most) companies let their “graphic designer” handle web design.
4. FrontPage 2003 is a Microsoft product, therefore they won’t even care about web standards unless Microsoft does.
5. Their portal software is still using non-standard and/or propriety code.
6. Lack of Arabic books, Web Sites and tutorials on how to make standard-compliant Web Sites. I’m not sure if they even exist.

In this post, I’m going to write why companies should make modern, standard-compliant Web Sites. And by “modern, standard-compliant” I mean:

• Separating web pages’ structure (HTML), layout (CSS) and behavior (JavaScript).
• Writing valid, standard (not propriety) HTML/CSS code.
• Writing standard, cross-browser and unobtrusive JavaScript code.
• Applying good coding practices, which make documents accessible, cleaner and flexible.

Note that the following reasons do not cover all of the advantages. If they don’t convince you, however, then I honestly don’t know what will.

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If there’s one thing that frustrated me so much in JavaScript, it would be dealing with events (thanks to Internet Explorer). Most of the scripts handling events out there contain lots of browser and/or feature sniffing to decide which event method to use. For example, the following is a code excerpt from Sitepoints DHTML Utopia (the worst books I’ve read on the topic by the way):

if(window.event) // IE check
   el = window.event.srcElement;
if(e && e.target) // standard-compliant browsers
   el = e.target;

This seems like the only way for many JavaScript coders to deal with browser differences. That’s what i thought ,too, until i read Wrox’s Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (a must-get). The book’s author, Nicholas Zakas, introduces a much more convenient way for dealing with events. It basically involves using a cross-browser event object which creates DOM-like event methods for Internet Explorer.

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