div’s You can imagine my pure bliss when Andrew told me about his find… CubeCart. ZenCart and osCommerce looked to be a thing of the past; I now have an xhtml/css tableless design that I can mold and define how I deem needed with minimal pain, and a complete/proper separation of content. Well, the xhtml and css part was right.
Trading tables for div’s is not professionalism
You’d think, by now, the idea of trading long, table driven sites for excessive div ridden sites would be taboo — it’s been ranted on from Dave to Jeffrey, and the majority of us have a sincere understanding that simplifying your html means clean structured semantic code. This simplification lends your design to even simpler css.
Regardless if you’ve focused on proper XHTML, without semantic, intelligent coding you’ve returned to the dark ages dragging a new premise with you.
What does that mean? Simply put, your tags are used to outline your content, disregard the style for now, it bears no meaning. I say this biting my tongue, as the subjects been beat to death with a big, slow, stick for years now.
Compare:
CubeCart’s code:
Inline styles, div’s in place of headers, break tags, clearing break tags? How about this:
Latest Products
-
![Test Product]( "Test Product")
Test Product/h3>
$10.00 $6.99
Even simpler, their example:
Information
Products: 1
Categories: 1
Prices: US Dollars
and my simplification:
- Information
- Products: 1
- Categories: 1
- Prices: US Dollars
Their code is a presentational driven method — mine is a semantic driven method, and I’ll style the exact same way if needed (though I won’t) if that’s the case.
So who cares?
Mobile users, handicap users… a large audience of potential buyers and visitors not worth losing simply because you don’t care or don’t know. When you’re willing to lose an audience simply because you choose to not do things properly the first time; you shouldn’t be in business, you’re making bad decisions.
The moral of the story is while I was extremely excited about a standards driven store — it took ALMOST the same amount of time to tear this apart, as it did a ZenCart demo yesterday as well… and that was a table driven mess. XHTML/CSS as a marketing slogan does not always equate to simplistic, quality design and development… but it should. It separates the hobbyists from the professionals in more ways than one.
Overall
CubeCart is a fantastic launching point for a standards driven shopping cart — but expect to spend some long hours tearing it down and building it with proper html… and unlike wordpress, it’s template tags you’ll have to deal with, that can easily give you a headache.
Now, my only gripe is I have to pay $70 to release the copyright, when I’ve pretty much rebuilt it from the neck up…