Comments on: 8 Tips to Keep Your Markup in Check

By: Cara Dixon

Cara Dixon — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:43:35 +0000

Some great hints and tips here! A great article – thanks for sharing!

By: Amber Weinberg

Amber Weinberg — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:28:58 +0000

Great tips. Many programmers and designers, even developers I work with simply do not understand the importance of clean semantic code. Its very frustrating.

By: Jeff Starr

Jeff Starr — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:36:24 +0000

@Mike Hopley: I beg to differ. Document size does affect performance. Anything that increases file size by any amount increases loading time and consumes resources. File compression is not universal, and therefore should not be assumed during optimization efforts.

By: Jack F

Jack F — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:49:05 +0000

Wow plug-in fail

I find that commenting like

Helps me, just because any program that does syntax highlighting makes comments different colour to code, making it easy to spot whilst just quickly scanning through a document.

Jack

By: Karinne Legault

Karinne Legault — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:41:04 +0000

@Dean – Sorry about that! We really don’t know what’s happening with the plugin. We hope to sort it out very soon!

By: Dean

Dean — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:48:22 +0000

WTF /w the code samples in FFx ?

By: Mike Hopley

Mike Hopley — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:37:53 +0000

Sound advice from Karinne, as usual. But I would like to pick you up on a detail:

We must also be careful of not nesting block elements inside inline elements. Tho most browsers will handle it fine, it’s semantically incorrect.

You’ve confused semantics with syntax. Nesting block-level elements inside inline elements is syntactically incorrect: the validator will shout at you, because your markup is malformed. It has nothing to do with semantics (the meaning of elements).

@Jeff:

Whitespace in HTML is irrelevant in terms of performance, for two reasons. First, because components (images, css, js) have a much greater effect on load times than the document itself; and second, because activating GZIP squashes the HTML anyway.

See my Yslow article on TWS for more info.

By: Karinne Legault

Karinne Legault — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:23:03 +0000

@Steven Black – Wow… that is really nuts! We are trying to fix this. Should be back to normal soon!

By: Steven Black

Steven Black — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 01:58:44 +0000

Is it just me or is the source code in this article not readable in FF or Chrome? The left edge is chopped.

By: Karinne Legault

Karinne Legault — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:51:21 +0000

@Patrick – Ah! That’s how I learned as well!

@JeremySkelly – I know that it might seem maybe redundant to comment a section that has a very good ID name but I just think it’s easier that way. You can quickly see where it starts. Plus in most editors where code is color-coded, the comments are in a different color so they pop right at you.

@teddY – Thank you! The amount of commenting is a matter of personal preference I believe but… it is needed. How ever much or little you put in, it just makes it easier to come back too.

@Pat Arlt – That’s a great tip … thankfully, my editor does that for me already

@Jonas – Working in a large company with hundreds of developer, commenting is a must. Sometimes you don’t get to work on the same project from start to finish. Things happen, you get an assignment somewhere else and then someone else has to come in and finish your code. Not everyone codes the same way so having comments here and there can help in the transition.

@Artboredom – No indentation OCD… I have that. Whenever I work on someone else’s code, I’m always going through and changing the indentation! A bit extreme I think! :p

By: sunil

sunil — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:05:16 +0000

Useful article

By: Jeff Starr

Jeff Starr — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:14:16 +0000

Lots of good points here, but keep in mind that addition of white space (tabbed indentation) and code comments inflate overall document size, which may increase loading times and consume unnecessary bandwidth. For highly optimized sites, drop the indentation and replace comments with descriptive IDs and class names, as suggested in previous comments.

Great to see teddY in the house, btw!!