Lately I have been going through a fair amount of Singaporean websites to see what the state of web development here is. So far - and as far as I can tell after this short period of gathering information - it seems that many of the leading - and most of the not-so-leading - design and/or web development firms have not yet caught up on the Web Standards way of doing things. Here’s a short list of stuff I came across:

• use of frames
• use of xhtml transitional to mask ‘faulty’ coding
• use of javascript that messes with your way of navigation

For instance st701.com, a recruitment and job search service which is owned by Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. Co who publishes 14 newspapers in four languages in Singapore and more than 90 magazine titles, uses javascript links in the job search results list not only risking poor accessibility but also messing about with how I like to use the site by opening a job description in a new tab. (which it will not let me. Instead the javascript will load new content)

However, I did find good work done by the people in the Web Standards Group Singapore and I hope they can find a way to have the leading companies integrate their methods and knowledge in future work.

Sigh…
I am filing this post under the category ‘annoyances’ because after having tried installing another WordPress Plugin I am getting very tired with the code many and I believe almost all of them produce: it screws up the xhtml and does not validate.
This also applies to many themes by the way.
I started using WP to quickly set up a blog site in order to post articles and have some of the plugins add extras to it, so I would have time for my work and projects, but now it seems I am spending more time figuring out what and why things go wrong all the time instead of writing content. Oh well, I guess that’s what you get when you’re a Web Standards Geek.

Now I use the theme K2 which is actually more than just a theme plus so far it validates and even has a nice live search feature.

Below I will put up and maintain a list of themes, WP widgets / plugins which cause trouble.

• default search widget
• Google Reader Shared Items
• aNobii WordPress Widget
• Event Calendar 3 widget ( with k2 Event calendar works)

Themes

• Briny 1.0
• Elite 1.0

Update: Now I am trying the Mimbo theme: a magazine theme. Not 100% standards compliant I think but I” try and clean up the code step by step.