Wired With Standards

Wired News has redesigned their site, and not just the front end, either: the really important stuff all happened behind the scenes.  Using no tables to lay out the page, but instead applying CSS to XHTML, the site is a stunning example of how standards can be made to work today.  They have an article with some details (and a few quotes from yours truly).

There are a few flies in this ointment, but they’re fairly understandable.  The pages don’t always validate, in part because of third-party advertisement code (which is notoriously horrible) and in part because converting seven-plus years of pages isn’t a simple task.  Actually, most of their validation errors seem to involve unencoded ampersands in URLs, which ought to be easy enough to fix.

The Web Standards Project calls this a gutsy move, and I agree.  A site with their kind of traffic has to make a big commitment to do something like this and stick to it.  The management of Wired is to be applauded for approving this move, and the men behind the scenes deserve even more applause for their work.  Look for a DevEdge article soon where we interview Douglas Bowman, the point man on the Wired redesign.

• Wired With Standards was published on Friday, October 11th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Standards categories.
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