The Apple Store

Created 9/28/2007, updated 3/12/20242 minute read

But while its beauty and usability have always run ahead of the pack, its underlying source code has not always kept pace. Now the online Apple Store’s inside is as beautiful as its exterior—and as far ahead of the mainstream in web development as a company like Apple needs to be.

One day, all sites will be built like this. View Source for an inspiring glimpse of how semantic and accessible even a grid-based, image-intensive, pixel-perfect site can be.

Although the store front looks absolutely magnificent I am not so sure about the source. There is a lot of superfluous whitespace which makes it much harder to read than it should be. Tidy reports these warnings (but no hard errors):

line 439 column 217 - Warning: nested emphasis <span>
line 1601 column 238 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 1603 column 234 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 1605 column 251 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 1609 column 233 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 1644 column 235 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 1679 column 231 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 1681 column 239 - Warning: unescaped & which should be written as &
line 109 column 9 - Warning: <link> inserting "type" attribute
line 116 column 13 - Warning: <link> inserting "type" attribute
line 117 column 1 - Warning: <link> inserting "type" attribute
line 207 column 9 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 310 column 13 - Warning: <script> inserting "type" attribute
line 316 column 37 - Warning: <a> anchor "usernav-home" already defined
line 320 column 13 - Warning: <script> inserting "type" attribute
line 527 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 597 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 667 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 737 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 811 column 191 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 881 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 951 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 1021 column 192 - Warning: <img> lacks "alt" attribute
line 1234 column 17 - Warning: <form> lacks "action" attribute
line 1847 column 41 - Warning: <input> proprietary attribute "border"
line 1878 column 13 - Warning: trimming empty <div>
Info: Document content looks like HTML Proprietary
26 warnings, 0 errors were found!

Pipe it through tidy -i and it does look great, but without it I’m left feeling unsatisfied looking at the source. Maybe Apple needs to take some inspiration from Haml.

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