Web Standards and the new layout

[Brian Kerrick Nickel <kerrick cox net>]

I've been reviewing the source of the new gnome web pages, and while
they abide by W3C rules, they are quite aways off from achieving the
intent of those rules. The fundamental rule to go by is, "If all the
stylesheets where taken away, would this be a usable document?"
To point out major problems, I'll go through what should be corrected on
http://developer.gnome.org :

First and foremost, the main navigation has been placed at the bottom of
the page, instead of the top (where it appears), causing an
accessibility problem for people on lynx, screen-readers, etc. I read
that this was for the benefit of search engines, but that really isn't
the best approach.

The page lack a <h1 />. For this site, the ideal H1 would be the gnome
icon itself (actually, its alt), along the lines of:
<h1><a href="http://developer.gnome.org/";><img
src="/images/gnome-64.png" alt="GNOME Development site" /></a></h1>
Dropping the image's id and placing the rules on the h1.

<p class="none"></p> serves on purpose for the document's content and
should be removed.

<p class="section">Navigation</p> should be <h3>Navigation</h3> as it is
in fact a heading. To keep the size the same, h3 { font-size: 100%; }
will do the job.

I'm not sure a definition list is the right way to present the link
list, but creating a new list for each pair is really pointless.

Now for some nitpicking:
There is a real overuse of the ID attribute. CLASS is the ideal
attribute for CSS formatting as it is more general and can be reused.
This may just be me but I think that whitespace in visible elements
should be maintained in the code, so all these line breaks in sentences
should be removed.
The copyright <div> should be referred to as a footer, as it contains
more than a copyright.



I've put examples of what I mean at
http://www25.brinkster.com/scriptguru/gnome/developer.html and
http://www25.brinkster.com/scriptguru/gnome/index.html

The community at http://www.DHTMLCentral.com/forums/ is very good when
it comes to web standards issues. They would be an excellent group to
help review and perfect code and accessibility issues (except Tim Scarfe
really isn't a fan of GTK+, so watch out for him).

.Brian