Understanding Nothing

BlackStar.co.uk recently redesigned their website to supposedly be XHTML 1.0.

Although it doesn’t actually validate, it has drastically reduced the download time of pages – particularly the front page.

However, someone seems to have listened to too many branding experts or something. Their homepage mentions the full URL of the site 191 times! Of course, this is all solely in the HTML source so any potential branding impact only applies to the freaky people who actually read the source of web pages…

The one simple act of making all the URLs absolute rather than relative bloats the file size of the page by over 19%. That’s over 4Gb of completely needless traffic per million page views. They must have money to burn on bandwidth or something…

So Steve creates a bookmarklet that lets me see that my default MT RSS feed is bad.

Then Beowulf points me to Cynthia, who tells me that my alt = “RSS” tag on my RSS image is too short, as alt tags are supposed to be between 7 and 81 characters long, my “powered by MT” logo doesn’t have an alt tag at all, and my permalinks are bad as they all display the same text but link to different places.

I’ve fixed the others, but what are you meant to do about permalinks?