Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Dan Gillmor, tipped by a post from Robert Scoble, notes the irony of Demo conference award winner Homestead’s slogan, “your website company”.

It seems that Homestead isn’t fond of non-Microsoft OSes. The ‘official’ requirements seem to be Windows and IE4+ or Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x. As a practical matter, their SiteBuilder app worked straightaway in Firefox on Windows — just ignore the nattering about Communicator in the warning dialogs and you’re set. Strange that they would be flogging a painfully obsolete browser when the very latest and best works just dandy.

The actual output of the tool is a mixed bag too. It eschews layout tables — a nice surprise — but uses style attributes and absolute positioning to put things in place. Kludgey, and not at all in line with what I would consider best practice, but I’m not at all sure how I’d do better with a WYSIWYG tool.

Digging further, the tool still generates old-skool <font> tags for text styling, inserts a funky combination of <br> and >div> tags for paragraphs and piles on the Java, text GIFs and JavaScript. Those JavaScripts, in turn, generate truly nightmarish <table> and <font> tag agglomerations for navigation menus and the like.

As for validation…well, the output is close in most respects — an odd attribute here and a smattering of unencoded ampersands there is all the validator can find to complain about.

I’ve only really done a cursory review, so I may have missed a great deal. Nevertheless, my initial impression is of an app that would’ve been really cool five years ago but feels painfully out of step with current trends in both design and technology.

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