I’m hitting these keys out of habit. They are Cmd + Alt + U in Chrome on a Mac. Ctrl + U in Firefox on a Windows-machine. This is kind of a hobby to me. I’m talking about viewing the source.
It’s probably why I got obsessed with #kodsmuts to begin with. I’m seeing a lot when I view the source. A lot of mistakes and bugs. The thing that often hits me is that it seems like many of them are just simple mistakes. Somebody forgot to remove something or add something or didn’t know that weird thing was duplicated. Common things are missing headers, dead links to JavaScripts, duplicated links to css and a very common one: meta content=”width=device-width” even though your site clearly isn’t responsive. A lot of things is not visible to the eye. But as we all know the beauty of a web site isn’t only what’s on the outside.
It seems to me that we are not viewing the source of the web sites we are working on enough. So I now urge everyone to at least start checking the most common page types before you put things into production. Check each element and make sure you know what it’s doing and why it’s there. If you are not sure ask your colleagues.
Let us stop making these stupid mistakes!
My non-geeky girlfriend nowadays knows Ctrl + U by heart, because my knee-jerk reaction to her showing me a cool site is exactly that: “Hit Ctrl + U!”. Not what she’s going for.
“the beauty of a web site isn’t only what’s on the outside” — love it!