Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

More sites jumping on the CSS + structural markup bandwagon:

Firtst, Happy Cog Studios has redesigned the Amnesty International USA site. Jeffrey Zeldman discusses the challenges of working with a large site on a tight budget and his experience with the dreaded 3rd party problem. He also has a more complete discussion of the issues here.

Next up, telecomms giant AT&T has pulled off a valid XHTML strict home page, complete with a Flash movie (yeah, SVG might be nice, but realistically browser and plugin support just hasn’t reached practical levels). Go Ma Bell, go!

Finally, the open source Mono Project has come within three errors of validation. The gotchas are small: a non-standard attibute value, a missing alt attribute and a missing <li> tag. While not technically valid, they are using clean, semantic markup and that’s the most important thing. Besides, I’m inclined to cut ‘em a bit of slack on the site — replicating Microsoft’s .Net framework as a cross-platform API is a momentous undertaking, and little details like three piddling validation errors on the site are bound to get overlooked here or there while they persue the greater goal.

Hat-tip to Eric Meyer and the ‘Redesign Watch’ item he’s got tucked away in the right-hand column of his site.

Update: Joe D’Andrea of the AT&T web team emailed to say that we haven’t seen nothing yet.

Joe’s team has completed makeovers of some 30 pages on the site, and are slowly but surely working through the remainder. Meantime, he says they’ve got some serious DOM and ECMAScript goodness up their sleeves, and after that will be moving on to IFR and sIFR. Ultimately, Joe says they’re aiming for zero inline ECMAScript and all page behavior defined through context and content. Woohoo!

It’s great to see that a decade and change after spinning off Bell Labs, someone at Ma Bell is still keeping the spirit of innovation alive.

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