ANN: Jeffrey Zeldman's Website Advisor released

Question

WebAssist is proud to announce the release of Jeffrey
Zeldman's Web
Standards Advisor, a tool to help web designers reap the
benefits of web
standard compliant sites. Built in collaboration with Jeffrey
Zeldman, the
leading authority on web standards, this Adobe Dreamweaver
extension
includes full HTML and CSS validation as well as checks a
wide range of web
standard issues.
Key features:
* Access W3C HTML and CSS validators from within Dreamweaver
* Validates linked, imported, embedded or inline CSS
* Checks 9 different microformats
* Reviews single page, multiple pages or entire site
* Advises on a range of web standard issues, from classitis
to deprecated
tags.
* Go directly to the code for any reported issue
* Full HTML report, suitable for printing
* Advice on what's nonstandard and how to bring it into
compliance from
Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards.
Works with Dreamweaver CS4, Dreamweaver CS3, and Dreamweaver
8 on both Macs
and PCs.
Jeffrey Zeldman's Web Standards Advisor is only $49.99
($34.99 upgrade for
owners of Super Suite and Web Designers Suite).
For more information, visit
http://www.webassist.com/go/webstandards
To check out Jeffrey Zeldman's thoughts on the subject:
http://www.zeldman.com/2009/01/12/jeffrey-zeldmans-web-standards-advisor/
Best - Joe
Joseph Lowery
VP of Product Management, WebAssist -
http://www.webassist.com
Author, Dreamweaver CS3 Bible -
http://www.idest.com/dreamweaver/

Answer 1

"James Shook" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Gary White wrote:
>
>> I'm not an expert either. However, if a person were
completely fanatical
>> about semantic markup, he would suggest that items
like that should be
>> styled with CSS. <style type="text/css">
>> .bookTitle {font-style: italic}
>> </style>
>> ...
>> Herman Melville wrote <span
class="bookTitle">Moby Dick</span> in 1851.
>
> I am no fanatic, God knows, but I use:
>
> <style type="text/css">
> .speciesName {font-style: italic}
> </style>
>
> One of the most unusual passerines is <span
class="speciesName">Nestor
> notabilis,</span> which is the only parrot to live
in alpine regions.
>
> I do this simply because italics are the accepted
typographical
> presentation for binomial nomenclature.
>
> But how is this more semantic? Am I not simply moving
visual presentation
> to an arbitrarily-named class? Apart from the
convenience of being able to
> modify "speciesName" globally if desired, I see no other
advantage of
> using CSS rather than <i> except to avoid jeering
from semantic purists.
> But the purists would be mistaken if they thought moving
the visual
> presentation to CSS using a class creates any semantic
improvement. It
> conveys no more information than <i>Nestor
notabilis</i>--it just removes
> the visual presentation to a centralized location. No
user agent, so far
> as I know, looks at author-created class and/or id names
and tries to draw
> any conclusions from them and about what objects they
are applied to. And
> even if they did, what would that conclusion be? Would a
speech-based
> browser see that the item is the "scientific name" for
something and adopt
> an arch, pedantic tone of voice when reading it? To do
that they would
> have to track up to the CSS rule, have the linguistic
wherewithal to
> "understand" that "speciesName" is a kind of thing it
has a prepared way
> to say and then use it. I don't think it is likely any
user agent tries to
> interpret the names given by authors to classes and ids.
First of all,
> think of all of the variations of "speciesName" that
would have to be
> provided for, since there are, so far as I am aware, no
conventions for
> names for even commonly-used data items to style with
CSS.
>
> There may be user agents crawling around out there who
are trying to put
> together a master on-line database of all of the various
species for which
> they can find references. Something like this might be
trained to
> recognize all of the possible forms of "speciesName" but
will certainly
> miss many because there is no conventional way to name
this, as well as
> many other data items that specialized user agents might
like to find.
>
> For things like species' names, book titles and other
things that are
> presented in italics by typographic convention,
certainly use a class for
> the convenience it provides for global styling, but
don't think you have
> created semantic meaning by doing so. After all, I might
just as well use:
>
> <style type="text/css">
> .thingThatsAlwaysInItalicsByTypographicConvention
{font-style: italic}
> </style>
You might consider collaborating on a new book with David :-)