Globe and Mail Standards Compliant

I’m not sure how recent it was, but I noticed today that Globe and Mail—one of Canada’s national newspapers—recoded their website to be more standards compliant. The site validates at only 24 errors, a far cry from the hundreds it had previously, and many of the current errors are minor (such as not encoding ampersands in URLs).

What made me take a look was their recent addition of a text-sizing option in the top right hand corner of articles pages. This feature is common on CSS-based sites, so I thought I’d take a look under the hood. They have a way to go still (there are the occasional table and font tags), but their code has become more semantic and more of the styling has been thrown into the CSS file.

And they have an RSS feed to boot.

By Kim Siever

I am a copywriter and copyeditor. I blog on writing and social media tips mostly, but I sometimes throw in my thoughts about running a small business. Follow me on Twitter at @hotpepper.