Talking Web Standards

29 September 2003

No matter how many times you reason the case for web standards, there are some people who just don’t get it. They hide behind their ignorance as if it were knowledge, and the illusion of truth that they have created for themselves prevents them from opening their minds to the cold, hard evidence.

Today I was told that “standards are only useful when tempered with experience and testing”. What this actually says is “I don’t understand web standards. I’m out of my comfort zone. I’ll just do whatever appears to work for the browser I’m using and that’s the defacto standard”. Yeah, right.

Speaking as someone who (like many of you) has a whole load of experience specifically in building for the web, and who has done an enormous amount of testing across multiple platforms, multiple browsers and multiple years, I can categorically say that the easiest way of ensuring a consistently good user experience is to build using web standards. I’m not just saying it’s the ‘correct’ way, or the ‘best’ way or even the most fashionable way, but above all it’s the easiest way of reaching that goal. Where do these people think the recommendations came from? Were they just dreamed up as a method of making web professionals jump through hoops, or might they actually serve some useful purpose perhaps?

It’s all this hard-earned experience and testing has led me to work exclusively in XHTML and CSS for the last two and a half years or more. This results in the what I was told today boiling down to “web standards are only useful when tempered with web standards” – which is clearly ridiculous. Grrr.

On a slightly happier note, today we were pleased to welcome my new little neice to the world. Welcome to the world, Miram.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ K: Testing? We don’t need no stikin’ testing! ;-) It would seem that experience and testing have lead to these standards for many reasons.

It kind of goes without saying doesn’t it? Just like every final product in every realm gets tested, it also is produced against certain standards for the best possible outcome (and so idiots can’t pass junk off as a good thing).

Of course, I have seen the opposite where unthinking mgrs. (mostly) just assume that the ”standard” will produce the best work automatically.
§ Bob Monsour: If experience was needed, then why was I able to create a brand new site for my son’s school, using xhtml and css, in just a couple of months? Granted that the site is not exceedingly complex, but it does have some rich functionality (check out the calendar).

I tried to use a lot of the tools out there, but found that I was far better off doing it with a good editor and a generous assortment of O’Reilly books at hand. For a look at the result, see www.princetonacademy.org. Note that some of the content is driven by MovableType, but the design is all css, all the time.

This was my first site (other than my blog, which I have not taken any time to ”stylize”) and I am completely sold on web standards (thanks to guys like Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, among others). Perhaps it’s because I was untainted with the tower-of-babble known as table-based design. Interestingly, as I’ve done a lot of view-source’s, I’m generally having trouble figuring out table-heavy designs.

Anyway, nice post and I completely agree.
§ Jesse: I like that site Bob ;)

...and I totally agree Drew. I am having a hard time with marketing types that think they can’t have the design they want with standard and accessible code.

Their problem is the techies near them don’t understand standards just ASP, .NET, and FrontPage. Oh and they curse Mac’s. I can’t believe that in an industry with such rapid change people seem to find a level of understanding then stop learning. ”No nothing new please, leave the boat alone and get out.”

Luckily I have the Ontarian’s with Disabilities Act (simaler to US section 508). It lacks any real teeth but it is a step in the right direction. I am just doing my 4th of many presentations to come on accessibility and standards on wednesday. Slowly they are coming around...
§ Kris: Just killfile ’em. I stopped caring for the wellbeing of the legion of asses. It is their nemesis, not mine.

And congratulations.
§ Pete: This is something I’ve slowly been working on with my colleagues for around 18-24 months. I’d have to be honest and say I might not have approached this in the right manner however; we’re fortunate to be afforeded much rope in the web team at work, and can dictate our own coding practices, pretty much on a person-by-person basis.

To this end, I started coding with standards for everything I did quite rapidly late 2001.

Caused some upset on occaision amongst the other team members - mainly due to frustration at having to learn something ”different” - but they’re now taking an active interest and asking all sorts of questions.
§ tomjleeds: I don’t believe Drew was saying that experience was needed, or even important. He was simply saying that he has learnt from experienc.

I went from doing simply table-based stuff to average PHP-ability in quite a short space of time. The same is true of my XHTML and CSS skills - you just need a bit of time and the wish to learn.
§ vflytrap: I just discovered web standards in the last few months - and something in me (probably a conjuring of Zeldman) told me that it was the only way to build all my new stuff. I attacked it by designing my own compliant CSS site, and now, not only have I learned it, but I build all my new sites in it... I run into clients every now and then who have no idea what it is or what it’s about and for them, it comes down to $$ - but when I ”replaced” a PR Agency designer, part of the owners big impression from me was the fact that I was interested in creating ”standard compliant” sites that would essentially bring his business/clients more $$ - and save him from paying so much in updates. Then, when I went to a website and showed him how it validated, he was sold.
Some people just aren’t open to change, and that’s what it comes down to. But we can all only do our part.
I guess my point is don’t worry about the shmucks - we’re part of a ”revolution” and some folks aren’t cut out to be revolutionary.

(Side note: I’m teaching a web design class - and incorporating standards so that there aren’t more ”bad” designers unleashed upon the internet - yay!)
§ Ryan Parman: I wrote an article earlier in the summer called Play By The Rules. It made Henrik Gemal’s front page...
§ Keith: I recently worked with a designer that referred to standards as ”early adopted, unproven technology”...At first I wanted to laugh, but then I saw that she just didn’t have the experience or frame of reference to ”get it” at all.

All I wanted to do is replace an image mapped nav bar with a CSS styled text list. I tried explaining that it wouldn’t look much different, and pulled out the old ”text should be text” argument, but in the end I needed to just do it and show her.

She wasn’t all that impressed (I think she was feeling a bit out of her element and just didn’t want to admit it) but she had to concede the ease of making text updates in xhtml over cutting a new image every time.

The thing is, as much as I agree with you, some kind of middle ground needs to be found, I find so many developers and designers that are turned off by many folk’s aggressive push of Web standards. We all know it’s the right way to go, but I think the challenge now is to help people ”get” it without putting them on the defensive.
§ K: While I agree with most of the posts above, Web Standards will not make you a better designer in and of itself any more than any other industry standards will produce a better product because of the standards. ”Bad Designers” or developers or whomever, can and will continue to make lousy sites, but will now be coded with xhtml, CSS and some xml database using php. Instead of putting their superfluous animated gif in a table, they’ll just put it in a div. Weeeeeeeeee!

Using standards is only one aspect of designing a great site, application or online media campaign. Please don’t confuse bad design with the mere use of a table or two for, yes, tabular data.

All in the <head>