Giuseppe Scappaticcio

Posted by David Bushell

Giuseppe Scappaticcio is an italian Web Strategist based in Tuscany, Italy. He has been working for over 10 years in the internet industry, producing a moltitude of professional, innovative, and creative projects for his clients, including corporate branding, website design and web promotions.

I found Giuseppe Scappaticcio via HTML5 Gallery. His website is certainly a spectacle from a design point of view, but it's also worth noting for the development side. A quick view of the source will leave you pleasantly surprised.

no IDs, no Classes, no DIVs

Sounds ambitious right? Maybe a little too idealistic? Well the more I think about this the more I like it. Minimal source is what we should all be aiming for. No superfluous elements clogging bandwidth streams, no DIVs nested 20 layers deep confusing search engines crawlers.

A good developer should question every page being marked up. Which elements are the correct/logical choice? How am I going to apply CSS to them later? I suggest you take the "no IDs, no Classes, no DIVs" mantra every time you start developing a site. Really conserve your HTML as if it's a non-renewable source. Give the page a little shake after completion and see which DIVs fall out. Make a sport of it, go hunting for all those wild DIVs. Cure your divitis.

Of course the idea does have it flaws. For example I would always suggest a website should be using microformats when possible. And that requires a class or seven. But hey, it's a solid idea to start with. At the end of the day if the website looks like it's suppose to and works for the end user then it doesn't really matter (that much). I could have built this page with tables and you won't know until you check. Did you just check? Shame on you I would never have done that!

CSS Resets

The next logical step in my behind the scenes look at Scappaticcio's website was to view the CSS. I like the majority of what I see. Good selector choice and minimal styling. After all minimal HTML will lead to minimal CSS.

But hang on! Right at the top of the stylesheet we see a massive CSS reset. The ball has been dropped here in an otherwise perfect game. Why go through all the trouble of seeking perfection and then have this excess CSS? There are two reasons why this ruins our minimalist purity. Firstly, you're potentially applying styles only to go and restyle them later. Scappaticcio's website manages to avoid that. But secondly, you're applying styles to elements that aren't even being used. 50% of this reset deals with tables!

So that's a minor gripe but again we're living in a land of perfection here. In reality I will always go ahead a plonk the YUI CSS Reset on line 1 of my .css and be done with it. Some link love to Vladimir Carrer and Mark Aplet for writing two great articles on CSS resets recently.

Goodbye IE6

It has been found that the browser in use is Internet Explorer 6.0 or a previous version. Please visit this website with a more recent browser. Thanks.

Perhaps my favourite part of the source code. What's preceding that is an IE6 only stylesheet with body * { display: none; }. Hilarious isn't it! As a web developer you have to make the decission - are you going to support IE6 or not? The answer lies with your clients, or your clients clients. If they use IE6 it's your duty to support it or say goodbye to a lot of business.

So I applaud Giuseppe Scappaticcio for making such a bold choice. It's very likely he's skilled enough to produce his site fully in IE6 but has decided the effort would not be rewarded. So why allow people to potentially view your website in a bad light? Just close the door. It's an interesting thought. I'm pretty sure Design Heroes looks terrible in IE6, but it's still accessible. Do I really want people seeing it in that state?

And Finally

Is there truly a perfect way to markup HTML and CSS? There are certainly many good and bad practices floating around the web. I say aim for the minimal and you can't go far wrong.

What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below! (but don't comment on my source code please - I had a long day OK!)