Posted by usenet+2004 on 10/06/06 09:13

Mike:

> <a href="mailto:inquiries@bottlepal.com"><FONT STYLE="font-family:
> comic sans; color:ff0000;">Inquiries, Comments<FONT></a>

With no URL, my comments are on this extract only, not how it fits into
the bigger picture.

The FONT element is deprecated in HTML4.01 in favour of stylesheets,
the idea being to separate style from structure. (The reasoning for
that is explained elsewhere - e.g., in the archives.) You appear to be
using FONT only as a grouping element, however, not to specify font
size, colour or face.

Instead of FONT's own attributes - size, color and face - you're using
inline styles. Good, but external stylesheets are more powerful, not
to mention neater, than inline styles in so far as they don't clutter
the markup with style rules, they are reusable, and they make it
'easier to manage style on a site basis' (HTML4.01 sec. 14.1).
Moreover, '[f]or optimal flexibility, authors should define styles in
external style sheets' (sec. 14.2.2), whatever 'optimal flexibility'
is!

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/styles.html

If you specify the CSS color property, unless you specify the
background colour too, the contrast between background and foreground
is unpredictable. Even if you work out the inherited value, there
could be other stylesheets that override your rule. Legibility is at
risk.

http://www.css.nu/articles/CSS-colours.html

The color property takes a keyword or a numerical RGB specification as
its value. 'The format of an RGB value in hexadecimal notation is a
'#' immediately followed by either three or six hexadecimal characters'
(CSS2.1 sec. 4.3.6). You are missing the <#>, and since '[u]ser agents
must ignore a declaration with an illegal value' (sec. 4.2), the color
is not set to red.

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#value-def-color

I would argue that link text should say what the URL points to. At
first blush I might think that 'Inquiries, Comments' is a link to
another page of some sort. Mailto URLs are a special case, and the
received wisdom is to simply repeat the e-mail address as the link
text. Whether specifying the title attribute is a good idea on mailto
links, I don't know.

http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#link-text

You are missing a </> from the FONT end-tag, upsetting the nesting.

While 'comic sans' as a font-family value does not need to be quoted,
it is a SHOULD condition in CSS2.1.

Why do you have some generic identifiers (element names) in upper case
and others in lower case? Consistency aids readability.

--
Jock

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