Is There An HTML Taxonomy?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 Comments (5)

While reading a blog post on Marketing Pilgrim here, I came across a writer who said he had visited a recent blog – actually, he’d clicked a link from Twitter – and read the post and left a comment. Then he, out of habit, right clicked on the page and took a look at the source code of the page only to find that he was sorely disappointed at the code. It looked like it had been done by a “drunk monkey” in 1998. I suppose that there are many old coded websites out there that rank and work well with old nasty looking code.

My thought was this: If you didn’t notice anything wrong with the page without viewing the source code, why then would it disappoint you when you did look at the source code? Whatever he saw must not have been too bad, right?

I don’t know what this writer (Joe Hall at Marketing Pilgrim) saw and it doesn’t matter. But it did get to thinking. Is there a taxonomy to HTML? Are there some codes that are better than others? Should you stay away from “primitive” code that will make you look like a drunk monkey? There are people who will tell you that coding in CSS is better than coding in tables. However, there are people who still code in tables. And their sites rank reasonably well. Does it matter?

I’d say that it really depends. The real issue is whether the old code impacts negatively your search engine optimization efforts and user experience on your website. Though, there are people who may not do business with you if you don’t code your site using the latest technology (this should be the minority of people). After all, only truly technical people will take the time to analyze a websites code.

When it comes to HTML code istelf, the latest iteration is 4.0, though 5.0 is in progress. If you are coding your own site, try to code as much as you can (or hire a professional to code for you and build your website) using the latest coding strategies, but don’t go hog wild and start using code that isn’t tested and proven.

Comments (5) Category: Content Development

Read similar posts in Content Development

5 Comments

Comment by Jennifer Gaglione

Made Tuesday, 3 of November , 2009 at 6:28 pm

“A drunk monkey in 1998″— that’s hilarious!

As long search engines can discern the text and visitors can get the information, it doesn’t matter if it’s coded in CSS or tables.

Comment by Corey Ehmke

Made Tuesday, 3 of November , 2009 at 8:37 pm

Nick,

There’s a very important visitor that looks at nothing but the HTML source of a given page– the search engine spider.

Code that is disorganized, is not standards-based, or does not adhere to W3C standards requires spiders to make educated guesses at the content, meaning, and structure of a page, rather than interpreting well-marked up, semantic code.

Messy code also tends to produce ‘code bloat’ and larger file sizes, which can directly affect performance. There are more than a few hints that the speed at which a page is delivered will be playing an increasingly important role in rankings moving forward.

Finally, the ‘drunken monkey’ code that you’re referring to is, by its nature, harder to maintain and more susceptible to browser-specific bugs or display inconsistencies.

Producing anything of lasting value, whether an enterprise web application or a simple static web page, requires the knowledge and discipline to follow best practices and consistently adhere to standards. This approach transcends any particular technology or technique, and lets you be proud of the result from any perspective– whether under the hood or on the surface.

Corey Ehmke
Chief Solutions Architect, SEO Logic

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Tuesday, 3 of November , 2009 at 11:03 pm

Hi Jennifer,
It is funny and you are correct, it really does not matter!

Hi Corey,
Thanks for taking your time to leave such a long and well though out comment for our readers. I agree with you but I think the point here is if a human, non search engine spider can find a good user experience, purchase the intended product, etc. then the code is not that big of an issue…

Of course, the code should be clean and should adhere to standards from an on site optimziation perspective but really, 99.9% of human visitors have no idea what clean code is…

Anyway, thanks again for reading and your comment!

Comment by Marah Marie

Made Wednesday, 4 of November , 2009 at 10:11 pm

“There are people who will tell you that coding in CSS is better than coding in tables.”

It doesn’t matter if you use tabled-based navigation in your HTML, at least not from an SEO/search crawler perspective; the main argument I hear against tables is that they’re harder to style and offer less options than empty divs or divs built around list HTML.

“When it comes to HTML code istelf, the latest iteration is 4.0, though 5.0 is in progress.”

There is also XHMTL, which is like HTML except its rules are a lot stricter.

“…but don’t go hog wild and start using code that isn’t tested and proven.”

But if you go hog wild anyway, HTML that isn’t tested and proven generally won’t work, so the worst that will happen is your site won’t display the way you intended it to, and/or it will fail HTML validation.

Found your blog on the Interwebs today and I really like it; keep up the good work.

Comment by Nick Stamoulis

Made Thursday, 5 of November , 2009 at 6:31 am

Hi Marah,

Thanks for reading and your additional comments for our readers…Excellent points!