Postmedia formatting hack

If you read any of the PostMedia (formerely CanWest) newspapers online, you know that their technical abilities are lacking, to say the least. One of the bigger issues to me is the formatting. Because they don’t comply with W3 standards (There are 403 errors on VancouverSun.com as of writing this), they don’t format properly in my browser (chrome on ubuntu):

As you can see under the picture, the words overlap each other, making them non-readable. Overall, the page is just ugly and not easy to just read the article as there is so much going on. On any of these PostMedia sites, if you add /mobile/iphone/ right after the .com/ part before you pass the URL on, you’ll see it gets cleanly formatted:

You may also notice there are now only 52 W3 errors, meaning it will render better in various browsers.

Hopefully this article will reach someone in Postmedia that can make decisions. If this is you, please contact me, I’d love to help make your websites more inviting as well as technically correct.

On other websites with bad formatting, you can often click the print icon on the website to get a more properly formatted webpage as well.