Submitted by ck on December 30th, 2004

Facts

Slashdot uses invalid HTML and has been configured to deny page requests coming from validator.w3.org (as of the time of this writing, 403 Forbidden is the response) [Update Apr. 2005: W3's validator is no longer blocked. -ed [Update Aug. 2005: It's blocked again. -ed]]. When saved locally and run through the validator, Slashdot's current front page generates over 100 errors and does not validate as HTML 3.2. When presented with a solution to modernize the site, CmdrTaco did nothing, and to this date, the site remains one of the worst examples of HTML on the internet.

Commentary

Slashdot makes a big deal of supporting web standards and criticizing others for not fully supporting them, when the slashdot front page can't manage to be valid HTML 3.2, which was superceded by HTML 4.0 in 1997. Since then, the standard for web design has moved to XHTML content and CSS presentation.

In 2003, alistapart.com published an article detailing their work creating a prototype of the slashdot homepage written in XHTML 1.0 strict which used CSS to control the presentation of the content. The changes would allow slashdot significant bandwidth savings and improved site availability (even more so with the article's followup showing printer-friendly and handheld-friendly stylesheets).

The project was covered on slashdot, but no renovations have been made to the obsolete codebase that is slashcode.

When initially approached about the project, CmdrTaco suggested that the author was welcome to submit patches to slashcode, but gave no indication that he recognized how badly broken his markup is.

More so, in what appears to be an effort to ignore the problem, he's blocked w3c's HTML validator from accessing slashdot.org. Such an action is particularly ironic for a site that spends so much time complaining about "security through obscurity" and is completely unprofessional and irresponsible, especially for a large site that claims to cater to software developers.

Slashdot itself is written with code that was incorrect when it was originally created and has not improved to this day. It should be recognized for its hypocrisy any time an editor publishes a story attacking bad coding practices and ignorance of clearly defined standards.

---

More injustices by other
Injustices Home