Evangelists, like me, of web page design standards know that the adage "Less Is More" rocks when it comes to Hyper Text Markup Language, Cascading Style Sheets, and other markup and programming languages. Best practices of web page design will always lead to using the fewest tags and the least tortured CSS style rules. On the web a small coding footprint is what you should be after.
Ever hear anyone refer to "Tag Soup?" It means web pages that are bloated with needless source code. I’m talking about things like tables nested needlessly inside other tables or miles of proprietary junk code (thank you Front Page). It all adds up to pages that are impossible to edit and take forever to download.
If it’s impossible to edit that means you can’t rapidly change your site, and if you can’t do that, you’re in trouble.
Call it "Less Is More" or "Tag Soup," – I call it The Code To Content Ratio. I want my pages to have lots of meaningful content with as little HTML and CSS code as possible.
By content I’m referring, first and foremost, to text (A Writer’s Medium) and then to imagery, multimedia, and other assets. A favorable code to content proportion is beneficial for everyone – humans, browsers, and search engine robots.
Is there a scientific way of knowing you have the right blend – the correct ratio of code to content? Not that I know of. But if you do things the right way and validate (error check) your work, you’ll find that the ratio will improve over time. At the same time, so too will your web page designing skills.
Here’s an example of what I mean. I will illustrate the way links are usually set up on a web page, then show how they should be set up.
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