Comments on Styling Google - AddedBytes.com

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Comment by Loke Krongaard Hansen ( http://www.pagerank-boost.com )

This is a nice trick indeed. Some of the pages i have created over the last years need a little twinking and i will definately be making the sites better on the eye from a cached point of view once i do this.

Small details make the difference in the end ;)

Comment on Styling Google

Comment by Wardy ( http://www.ccoder.co.uk )

just one other point id like to make is that most html these days is written on the server by the server at run time meaning weather u use tables or not could be up to your server should you decide that as option.

Compatability can be easily coded by determining the browser type and version and code can be written that works better for that client however there has to be a limit between the perfectly coded site and the time spent getting eventuality sorted so having a good idea of your target audience is also a handy thing to bear in mind.

Comment on Styling Google

Comment by Wardy ( http://www.ccoder.co.uk )

Nice advice dude :)

good to know people in the locality think the same way as myself.

I've also had some major problems with a host causing me a lot of downtime which can make google's cache usefull the only trouble is if like you say the page is destroyed by ugly "google was here" type code why would any user stay put !!!

cya around :)

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Comment by Michael Crabbe ( http://www.arcadexl.com/ )

I would hate it if people styled the Google cache information box, leaving an id="" like you said. It would make searching completeley inconsistent and inherently more awkward.

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Comment by James Sorbet ( )

The W3C site has a cool trick for getting IE to render the XHTML properly. To use it, one needs to use the ContentType of "application/xml"

Start the document with the following...

Where xhtml.xsl is a file withe the following content...

It's a nice trick and it all helps in the ongoing effort to conform to the guidelines.

Comment on Styling Google

Comment by Dave Child ( http://www.addedbytes.com )

Hi James,

Thanks for the feedback. One thing at a time ...

Feel free not to switch from tables. That's your choice entirely. CSS layouts can work very badly, if badly done. A well-created HTML and CSS page should degrade well with older browsers.

"This renders the site useless on a small resolution screen, perhaps a PDA or a cellphone." - That would be a problem, if cellphones displayed this site like this. They usually don't though - most reformat pages.

The design for this site isn't perfect. The "Search" header in the nav bar, for example, is broken. It's a work in progress. Now I'm happy with the backend, I'm starting work on a decent front end. Things like content types and so on will be fixed in due course.

The second of the http-equiv tags refers to the style type, and is correct. I agree about the use of http-equiv, and normally do not use it. However, for a hobby site being developed in a limited time, they did the job. They'll be replaced in the new design.

I am aware that XHTML docs should be served as "application/xhtml+xml" according to the specs. However, IE can't handle this type of document. The specs state that "text/html" is fine for HTML-compatible XHTML, which this is. In the next version of the site, I will probably serve correct types to those browsers that can handle it, but am not all that bothered while support is so poor for properly-declared content types.

Comment on Styling Google

Comment by James Sorbet ( )

I wouldn't switch away from tables just yet, for the sake of backwards compatibility, it's not a good idea. Older browsers will be lost if there's no positioning at all in the HTML. A well structured page created from valid HTML tables and a stylesheet can still look good in an older browser. Also, CSS positioning just isn't ready for the primetime yet. More often than not it produces rendering problems. Resize the window for this site if you want to see what I mean reduce the width and you'll see the navigation menu disappear at a certain point. This renders the site useless on a small resolution screen, perhaps a PDA or a cellphone. Tables provide the best level of compatibility at this moment.

I had a look at the source of your code. You're using META-EQUIV tags which is quaint. You appear to be trying to set the content type of the page twice, once as "text/html" and then a second time as "text/css".

This is quite amusing as neither of them are actually correct. You are using XHTML1.1 so the document is not html, and it's certainly not css. it's an XML document so the content-type should be "application/xhtml+xml". By not setting this, web browsers aren't actually reading it as XML at all, they're rendering it as HTML which defeats the object!

I'd also avoid using META-EQUIV tags completely. Not all browsers support them. If you need to add or modify a server header, do it on the web server, not in the document.

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Comment by KosherJava ( )

I tried a different approach on my site a while ago and just set display: none for tables. Users now see my page without seeing the google stuff at all.
This assumes you have no tables on your page.