Tag: web_standards

Technology, Web Standards

How to make your website more indexable by search engines

I see Michael Arrington has a post on TechCrunch today about Dipsie dCloak – this is a product which is supposed to help websites make their content more indexable by search engines.

That sounds laudable enough I hear you say – but wait a minute, I know two words which can help you do that without the aid of any product – the words? Web Standards. Build a site which is web standards compliant and search engines will have no problems indexing your site – also, you site will load faster, will be cross browser compatible and will work predictably on most mobile browsers!

Don’t know if your site is web standards compliant – check it out using the free validator on the W3C site.

Browsers, Mac, Web Standards

New Safari (released version) now passes the Acid2 test

The latest release of Safari (v2.02) – released in Mac OS X 10.4.3 today, now passes the Acid2 test – wohoo!

Safari's rendering of the Acid 2 test

Acid2 is a test page, written by the Web Standards Project, to help browser vendors ensure proper support for web standards in their products.

Safari is now ahead of every major browser in its support for web standards – Firefox, Flock, Opera all fail to render the Acid2 image correctly and don’t even mention Microsoft Internet Explorer!

The next version of Internet Explorer (IE7) will be released soon and what do you think are the chances that it will pass the Acid2 test?

Blogging, Business blogging

Sky News Live at Five team starts a blog with bugs!

The Sky News Live at Five program has started a blog – welcome to the world of blogs Jeremy and the Live at Five team.

However, the blog could stand some improvements (from a technical perspective) – for instance:

  • (the site doesn’t conform to web standards,
  • it doesn’t allow trackbacks or pingbacks,
  • it doesn’t allow comment authors to include the address of their own blog (if they have one) and
  • worst of all, it publishes commenter’s email addresses (when you Preview a comment), even though it states

We ask you to tell us your email address when you contribute, so we know you’re serious, but this won’t be published on the site.

Still, it is good to see a large news organisation dipping their toes into the blogosphere – as Fr. Ted might have said “Up with that kind of thing!”