While valid markup and CSS are necessary, they’re not the only things we web designers\u00a0require to keep our sanity. One can create a valid page that is still difficult to work on. For example, using absolutely positioned elements for page layout is even worse than just using tables. When you add content to one element, the ones below it are not pushed down because\u00a0they are no longer\u00a0in the “flow” of the page.\u00a0This causes overlap of content and\u00a0makes it extremely difficult and frustrating to add anything to the page. Utilities such as Yahoo! SiteBuilder create pages like this.<\/p>\n
A markup structure that is built to logically represent the content of the page and not to facilitate the appearance of the page is much more\u00a0easily edited and future-proof than the “HTML soup” sites of old. I wistfully say “old”, but the truth of the matter seems to be that HTML soup is still the preferred meal of the majority of so-called web designers. A lot of the web sites we’ve moved to our servers are a pain to work with and rarely validate,\u00a0and they were, sadly,\u00a0created by professional web designers!<\/p>\n
Another couple things that\u00a0are bad practice but not invalid\u00a0are the use of inline style and CSS classes with names that tie them to a particular stylesheet such as “red-text” or “left-side”. What if you change the stylesheet some day and that “red-text” is now supposed to be blue or the “left-side” spans the bottom of the page? The World Wide Web Consortium\u00a0themselves discourage the naming of CSS classes<\/a> like this.\u00a0They also\u00a0have some other\u00a0useful tips<\/a> that all web designers should read and keep in mind.<\/p>\n