Throughout my Web design and development career I have found incredible amounts of valuable help and fantastic resources while searching for solutions to various problems. In the last few years I have found most of this helpful information on Web standards and accessibility-oriented blogs and forums. It’s amazing that so many people are willing to spend so much time to share their knowledge with others and help make the Web a better place.
However, and that gets me to the subject of this article, occasionally I hear mutterings from some people who seem to think enough has been said about best practices and that we should find something else to write about. Some say that Web standards aren’t important anymore, because most Web developers are already using them. Others say that it’s boring to read yet another article, blog post, or book about CSS, HTML, accessibility, or usability. They don’t see the point in writing articles or books on those subjects since there are so few left to learn anything from them.
Are you kidding me?
The clued-in are a small minority
If you really think that the majority of people in the Web business have fully embraced Web standards, accessibility, and usability, and strive to follow best practices in general in their work, I’d like to know what planet you’re living on. On Planet Earth, standards-aware Web designers and developers are still a tiny minority of the people working in the Web business. Tiny. We may be vocal, and we may be the ones writing articles and books, but we are seriously outnumbered.
I encourage anyone who thinks we do not need yet another article or book on Web standards, CSS, accessibility, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, or anything else related to best practices, to take a quick look around you.
Go on, examine some of the work produced by Web agencies and IT consultancies in your town, city, or country. Look at the work of your colleagues and competitors. Would you say that the people working there have nothing left to learn? That they would not benefit from reading an article that explains how to replace their old school Web design techniques with modern, accessible, and search engine friendly methods? Did the sites you just examined really use valid, semantic markup and have no accessibility problems? Really? Wow. You must live in a very small place, with your place of employment being the only company in the Web business.
What those saying they don’t want to read more articles on best practices do not seem to realize is that only a fraction of all people who design and build websites for a living read blogs. Even fewer read blogs related to Web development, frequent sites such as this, or read books on modern Web development. Most (as in “more than fifty percent of”) people who build websites do it first and foremost to make a living, not because they are passionate about the Web or get a kick out of the idea of giving everybody equal access to information. As long as they get paid, that’s good enough for them. If the techniques they learned several years ago still seem to work and nobody complains, that too is good enough for them.
Many articles and a whole bunch of books have been written about Web standards, CSS, accessibility, and semantic markup. But I can assure you that not even those of us who spend most of our time working with and advocating best practices in front-end Web development have heard it all before. And the things we have heard about can almost always bear repeating. Web standards and accessibility are not “dead”, “boring”, or subjects that everybody knows everything about. Actually, I don’t think anybody knows all there is to know about them. But if you find the subjects boring or think you know all you need to know, fine. Nobody is forcing you to read everything that gets published.
It is my firm belief that Web standards are just as important to talk about now as five years ago or last week. The message needs to be repeated over and over again as long as the vast majority of Web workers continue to produce sub-standard websites.
The problem is how to deliver that message to more people than those who already know.
Reaching those who need to be reached
Like I said, most of the people we need to reach do not read our blogs. They have never heard of A List Apart, Zeldman or the css Zen Garden. So we have to find ways of spreading information outside our small group of standardista blogs. Here are a few suggestions for where we can find these people:
- Discussion forums and mailing lists. Perhaps you frequent a forum where the main focus is on PHP, ASP.Net, graphic design, Flash, or some other subject not directly related to Web standards or accessibility. Do what you can to plant seeds of information when you see an opportunity to do so.
- Local meet-ups. Organize a simple Web design get-together at a pub. Don’t mention anything about a special theme for the meet-up. Your first goal is to get a bunch of people together and start talking about Web design and development. You will likely be able to find at least a few people who are interested in talking about best practices. Then they talk to their friends in the business, spreading the information.
- Printed magazines. In my experience many Web workers prefer reading offline magazines instead of online publications. Contact your local (national) Web design and Internet related magazines and offer to write articles. It doesn’t have to be long feature articles. Start by sending them short tidbits to publish in their Tips and Tricks section, if they have one. You may even get paid to do this.
- Education. This is a big one. So many schools still teach students outdated ways of designing and building websites. If you can somehow influence teachers and instructors to update and improve what they teach students, much will be won. The WaSP Education Task Force is doing a lot of work in this area, but if you get the chance to affect what gets taught, take it.
Reaching those who don’t want to be reached
Reading an article or listening to a presentation does not necessarily mean that you will change the way you work, however. Many will be interested in learning how they can improve the quality of the work they do, but there are two groups of people that I find really hard to influence (please forgive me for generalizing):
- Purely visually oriented designers and Flash developers who do not want the Web to follow any logical rules at all. They want the Web to be a purely visual medium, and approach it as if it was a printed brochure, a computer game, or television.
- Back-end programmers who don’t really want to touch client side programming, and let their IDE create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for them.
I don’t really have any good suggestions for reaching these groups. Maybe you know what it would take to make them interested?
We still have a long way to go
If you consider yourself a Web standards and best practice advocate, please continue helping, explaining, and making it easier for the vast masses of Web workers out there to adopt modern ways of designing and constructing websites.
Let’s not stop fighting too early. The battle, if you choose to see it as a battle, has not been won. I would say that it has only just begun.
Man, this is the third great article I have read this morning during my RSS check. he.
Personally, I pictured myself a year and a half ago. I was then, who I get annoyed with today. I didn’t read blogs, I rarely read magazines, and my books were way outdated. So, its a tough balance - because at some point I made the decision to change the way I develop for the web. The first move was away from tables. This was a long move with many headaches at times. Then, I began to read more about accessibility and the semantic web, then…. It is all a great learning process, and I still have a great desire to learn more.
I think it boils down to what you said, there are some developers who are very set in their ways. They do web development solely to make a living. Some of them don’t even know/understand that the stuff they put out is horrendous from many perspectives. Then, there are others who are simply passionate about the web. It is an art to them. Finely tuned HTML, CSS, and even Javascript. Well thought out for the best user experience. Well thought out to be accessbile to all. Really understanding progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. They understand HOW the web works, and how it can work best for their users. It IS their passion.
So, how do we ultimately find the balance? Maybe people are tired of hearing about it because deep inside they know they are guilty? Maybe they don’t want to hear about it because they don’t know the steps to change? Maybe they don’t want to hear about it because it could mean a loss of business for them? In the past I took a very abrasive approach. I would hound standards to some, without realizing they had NO idea what I was talking about in the first place. I decided to put that behind me, and start taking action. I have jumped in and helped them move forward. I have shown them some of the steps. Being an example in action. I think there might be many fears - fears of change. So, again, how do we find the balance without offending others, yet being helpful?
I agree that its a VERY small number who have adopted standards. REALLY adopted them, not just built a page to pass the validators, etc. Im just not sure what the next step is for some…
In support of the point that most site designers aren’t interested in standards, I can tell you that I spend hours searching for examples of standards-based sites. I seldom find them in any sector on the web other than among designers who are already identified as standardistas. The vast majority of sites, even some sites that make honor roll lists of good examples of CSS, fail spectacularly on the various types of validation. The standards message may seem stale if you are only talking to the already convinced. To create change one must go beyond preaching to the choir to find the unconverted.
[…] Why Standards Still Matter: great article by Roger Johansson […]
Do standards-aware developers really want to be narcissistic bloggers churning out the same message until everyone gets it? Of course not - the reason they understand standards is because they challenged themselves to learn something new in the first place. It is natural that Standards should make way for other topics - after all the articles and blog entries are still there for anyone who wants to read them.
I don’t think standards should be forgotten but there is now a large community of professional developers using them by default. That community needs to develop their knowledge further.
I will continue to write about Standards but for me it is a category in my blog rather than the entire subject of it.
I agree with you, the word is out, but only to the select few who care. I’ve spoken with a few web design firms in my area. These firms insist that it’s all about “plug and chuck”. Use tables, get the site out quickly, move along. No time or care is taken to ensure standards are used and when I argued with them, they said “look at the majority of websites”.
Sites like myspace.com are just adding fuel to the fire when it comes to standards being thrown out the window. Having a site like that be the number 1 site in the world makes me cry. CRY!!!
Regarding local meet-ups: it would be nice to have a list of such in different countries, maybe as an extra to the article. Let me start the list by saying:
Sweden: Geek Meet
Hi, I need some help.
I’ve been trying my best to become a smart designer/developer for the web for a few years now and have recently really gotten into the whole standards thing.
My friend asked me yesterday, “why can’t we just use tables?” and I didn’t really have a good answer other than, “really smart people with sites that we respect don’t use tables, so neither will we.” The scary thing is, that’s my answer to everything dealing with standards.
So, maybe some of you smart designer/developer folks can help out a young naive beginner by helping me understand why I’m using only divs, why I spend so much time getting everything to validate, etc.
I mean there’s a ton of sites that tell me how to do all of this, but I haven’t found one that tells me why.
Thanks in advance for any advice, help, or direction.
“It is my firm belief that Web standards are just as important to talk about now as five years ago or last week. The message needs to be repeated over and over again as long as the vast majority of Web workers continue to produce sub-standard websites.”
I completely agree and I think that articles need to be published all the time to keep these issues at the forefront.
In this field we should all be constantly learning and growing our skill sets - not shying away from every new book or article that gets published. If anything we should all want more of these types of articles published so that we’re constantly reminding ourselves of best practices and methods. I can’t remember how many times I’ve forgotten about a great technique (just because I hadn’t had a need to use it every single day) only to be reminded by someone’s blog post or article.
Without constant repetition, the message gets lost.
Will,
That’s an relatively large question and one that would be hard to answer in this little texarea. The best thing would be to consume Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards. This book should give you every argument you’ll ever need to fight these fights as well as validate the work you’ve been doing. Then, once you’re done arguing, you can extend upon Zeldman’s book with other books/blogs/etc and become…how shall I say it…a badass.
Bottom line is it is all about, well, the bottom line………
While I fully agree with all your points, and wished everyone would use standards, I just do not see it happening anytime soon.
The unfortunate reality is web design firms will not adapt unless they are forced to. And it will not be the minority that forces these changes but rather their customers. When not using web standards cuts into their profits, then you can be sure that will change.
It really is the customer that needs to be educated to the benefits of web standards if you wish to see change.
I can see no reason why a web firm would invest time and money into something that gives them no benefits. The benefits gained by using web standards are in favour of the customer, not the designer.
So I think it’s a little pie-in-the-sky to expect any company to invest time and money in re-training, when it will do nothing for their bottom line.
Ken,
I’m not entirely sure about that. Since it does benefit the customer, eventually word is going to get out that web sites can be lighter, easier to maintain, easeir to update, provide better search engine ranking, etc. etc. etc. and customers are going to start demanding/expecting their site to be developed with web standards.
Once this happens, the firms that cannot adapt will start losing business, which will hurt the bottom line significantly more than re-training would.
I’m not saying this is just around the corner, but it will happen, and if firms haven’t adapted by the time it does, they are either going to have to overpay for people who have been doing it for years or they are going to flounder.
I am willing to bet we won’t ever see a mass-adoption and adherence towards whatever becomes of “web standardsâ€.
It isn’t that web standards are flawed – it just isn’t natural! We have, as a species, been predisposed to ignore convention and standards during development; regardless of efficiency or even common sense – sometimes it’s even out of our control. We will never see a complete and total adoption of web standards simply because standards in general fail.
Inspired by a similar post, I wrote more on:
Web Standards – an unnatural feeling!
Sean,
I agree with you. I’ll I am saying is the education part should be directed to customers and not web designers. That is my point here. There is no sense in trying to ‘educate’ web designers, but rather the emphasis should be to educate the general public.
Given that most of the ‘general public’ eyes glaze over when you start talking about anything code-wise, it is not an easy task.
Hopefully you are right that customers will start demanding web standards be used. Until that time comes however, if it ever does, don’t expect profit driven enterprises to change.
As to connecting with back-end programmers, you just need to talk on their terms. If you explain that standards based markup is easier for them to use (because there’s less of it), and uses less bandwidth (again because there’s less of it), they might start paying attention. Ultimately you have to make them realise that they bear some responsibility for the product that is presented to the end user. They need to feel that they’ve done the best they can. They can’t just shut off and say “That’s the designers work”.
You want to see standards get adopted overnight? Have the major search engines give extra weight to sites that validate or and standards based. If profit becomes a motivator then standards will gain a lot more traction. Any company building sites with table based bloat code would have to adopt or die.
Can you imagine if the top sites in your search results were all standards based? Think of how that would change the demands on curent skillsets.
Giv’r!
Google already gives higher a higher weight to standards compliant pages, which is one of my selling points in using standards with my customers.
Yet there has been no ‘overnight’ adaptation to standards. In fact search engine optimization (SEO) is usually a separate service web firms sell their customers. Again this is due to lack of knowledge on the consumer side. It’s the perfect situation for a web firm, sell the customer a non-compliant site, then in a few months after the customer inquires into why they are not ranking high in searches, sell them a SEO service.
Cynical I know……
Ken - I hadn’t heard that Google did anything specifically for standards compliant sites. Do you have any resources to verify that? If so I’d love to get my hands on them - more for my own benefit when selling customers on my work.
Expecting the customer to be informed is a pipe dream I think. Very few of the customers I’ve worked with had any inkling of what to ask. And rightly so. Not many customers who want a website even know what to ask for - they have a business to run. getting them what they want is my job. I suppose it’s not that different from hiring an accountant. Do some homework, get some reccommendations from friends, pick up the phone and meet some people - and hope you’re dealing with someone who knows their stuff when you finally do make a decision.
Stephen,
If you go to Google’s Web Master Help, you should find what you are looking for there.
Google being Google, will not explicitly say ‘Using standards will create higher rankings’, however, if you read all of their recommendations, they dovetail with the concepts and practices of web standards.
As an example:
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
There is nothing here specifically mentioning standards, but this described test is also valid for testing for standards and accessibility.
I hope this helps, if not I’m sure someone out here can find better documentation more your use.
[…] Why Standards Still Matter from Roger Johansson on Vitamin explains why we still need to strongly advocate web standards out there. A must read for the day. […]
I’ll say it here, I’ll say it on your own site Roger, I’ll say it on my own site, and I’ll say it to anyone who is looking in my direction: Web Standards is still preached by a select (yet growing) few…and as you’ve clearly asserted - it still has a very real need to be embraced by the web design world at large.
…I’m commenting further on my own site.
But ‘Does Web Standards still matter?’
YES - you better believe it!
Will it make me money if I follow web standards?
One thing that astounded me one IT lesson at school was when my IT teacher said “people that use CSS are only trying to be cool”. Those were his exact words. I still haven’t come to a conclusion as to why one would try to be cool by using CSS.
Though, since then, it’s become apparent that he knows nothing about Web Design and Development in general.
Great site, great article, and great comments.
Here is an argument for web standards:
Type “vitamin” into Google.
I am guessing that “web standards” may have something to do with why this site is site is listed at number one.
There is one argument for anyone that doesn’t get it.
@Martin:
“We have, as a species, been predisposed to ignore convention and standards during development; regardless of efficiency or even common sense”
But there are plenty of industries that exist that have sets of standards by which producers must adhere to (manufacturing, construction, research etc.); there’s no reason why web development should be any different.
Anyone who believes that the need for education about web standards is over should check out the source code in a couple of websites of government-funded institutions in the U.S. It’s my belief that within the U.S.-government-funded, nonprofit community (where I work), the need for spreading standards awareness will only diminish if these institutions start getting fined big-time for not complying with Section 508 and people are forced to pay attention. Until then, the poorly paid, time-crunched people (who are sometimes tasked with web design on top of tons of other unrelated duties) will have no incentive to take the time to change their techniques.
What about search marketing?
Everyone who wants to learn or continue learning web standards will do so. Google “web standards” and the search results are impressive with known web standards advocates. It’s not those who seek web standards knowledge that require an introduction to standards; it’s Everyone else.
Google “website design”; Yahoo “website design”. Then. Select any site, View source code. They’re Tables-based. I couldn’t find a single standards advocating site in the first thirty search results of either search engine. No Happy Cog. No NetRelations. Nobody. Those first thirty sites perpetuate the Un-necessity of web standards.
Standards advocates will need to enter mainstream commercial avenues if they truly want to educate the mainstream. How many standards-based design houses actually want to attract those mainstream clients?
Since placement in the Top 30 search result would take too much time, there’s search marketing.
Yahoo keyword bids for “web standards” has a ten-cent maximum; Yahoo keyword bids for “website design” has the highest maximum at $2.57USD. [Google would be slightly higher.] How many standards-based design houses are willing to pay that?
So, What about The WaSP Education Task Force entering mainstream search results via search marketing?
One issue for where I come from is that, web designers are generally trained in traditional mediums (print etc.) and has started doing it because of the growth of the internet as another major form of communication.
And coupled with the fact that businesses here are mostly unaware of web standards or even see internet as a comparable medium to print and tv, it is rare to find sites produced locally that are standard-compliant or not just viewable properly on a particular browser or “you would need flash” to view it.
I consider myself a designer but because of my background as a self-taught designer, but in recent months (I’ve just started work proper though) I have come to know about standards and has made the effort to know more (although I’m sad to admit my knowledge is still pretty lmited in all these) and hopefully incorporate them into my company’s work.
One way I feel that web standards can be promoted is to engage designers like me to read up. It is daunting for me to master the whole arrays of coding, standards and behind-the-scene developibg, but in reading up I appreciate more of how things are done and how I can relook at the project to see how we can implement standards.
Of course I have the luxury of good dialogues with the actual developer (who sits just right behind me:) so maybe that helps abit.
Anyway great article, enjoyed a lot. And lol will be using the “googling of vitamin” as an example next time I talk to client to see what’s their response.
[…] Roger Johansson setzt sich auf Vitamin mit Webstandards auseinander: “Why standards still matter”. […]
[…] Roger Johansson habla del largo camino que aún nos queda por delante para alcanzar las buenas prácticas. […]
I find it interesting that Vitamin’s audience is comprised only of text and image based web designers.
As a purely efficiency oriented web developer I choose not to fight on any side. True, I am mainly a Flash developer but my experience taught me that first a product must reach it’s intended audience and after that we can all work on the accessibility side of things. I find your approach on “standard based” web content as being a narrow view of the big picture. Why can’t be a web site approached in a way that it’s a printed brochure. Or like is a game that you can have fun playing. Or as a TV show that you can watch just like you watch your TV. Why do we have to highjack the web and say that you can only put on it stuff that can be accessed by anyone. Why does one fall to the dark and commercial side if one does not use only text on the web?
Let’s face it!
The web stopped being a page based medium for some time now. Even the Ajax crowd will agree on that. And although it is still mainly a text based medium, the video and audio podcasters and publishers would say that a video sequence says a million words and refuse to publish only the text transcripts of their video/audio content just for the sake of accessibility to all.
My belief is that when one starts planning for a new web site he should first think of the purpose and intended audience of the site.
Do you want it to pop up in Google’s results and anybody to be able to read it in Lynx?
Then by all means make it a clean and beautiful css based html page. If you lack the knowledge, go to the Zen Garden and learn how to do it. If you lack the ambition then use your WYSIWYG old editor that will shamelessly output the dreaded tables and get over it. It will still be on the web and all people will be able to read it somehow.
Do you want it to be more than a text document. For the users to be able to interact in a way that avoids page refresh and gives the user a better feeling? Do you want it to be a tool? Oddly enough people start to expect that from the web. Well then you’ll have to agree that the standards effort comes right after you have the functionality in place. The client demands that first.
And if the client wants to dazzle the audience with a video reel or some audio tracks then who are you to say that it can be done but it’s not in the standards so we can’t really do it. Say that and you have one client less.
So by all means let’s all advocate the standards. But first let’s take a good look at where the web is going to and remember that with regards of the Internet the standards are constantly one step behind.
@John –> Your examples of manufacturing, construction, research all having standards, most of which are enforced (some legally).
My point being, we won’t see mass adoption of web standards until there is something “forcing” us to do so — something that can enforce its use. This entity doesn’t have to be the government. Even having a higher influencial power such as Google weighting its search results higher based on the use of standards would do it.
Even within something as simple as “research”. Who remembers the several ways to cite references, the different formats (e.g. MLA vs. APA). How about even finding information (e.g. dewey decimal vs. DDC vs. LLC).
Roger hits the nail right on the head when he says that a regular web develepor does not even read web-standards blogs /forums. The large number of articles about “why web standards matter” just goes to re-inforce the fact that it is hard to sell this concept to developers/ companies. And I’d say it’s majorly because at some point there grew a divide between people who were working towards evolving the web and those who were using the web, when in fact both schools were ultimately, working towards the same end.
In a country like India, it’s even more difficult to explain the importance /need of web-standards to people, because they have been sold to the idea that developing web sites is a one-month training course. It will take a lot of effort before we can get to a stage where talking about web standards would be a “boring and monotonous” subject.
Its funny, that the minority of the people who know about web-standards, and have eventually grown to realise the need for the same, is now complaining about people advocating web-standards.
100% on the money, Roger. I often think that when we get together at conferences like dConstruct, @Media and of course SXSW, it’s a bit of an incestuous thing. Or, if the overlords of comment moderation will allow it, it’s more of a circle jerk (from Wikipedia: “The terms “mutual masturbation” and “circle jerk” are sometimes used as vulgar metaphors. They can refer to a situation, often in the workplace, politics or academia, where people are stroking each other’s ego without producing anything of value.”) So I don’t agree that we’re not producing anything of value, just that, as you say, we’re not always getting that message out to the people we really need to. Another catchphrase: “preaching to the converted”.
I rarely find myself looking at an agency’s work and thinking “Mmm, that’s a greta piece of work” … unless it happens to be related to someone I know from this industry.
I saw a piece of TV last night (News at Ten) about ‘the dangers of social networks’ such as MySpace and how paedophiles can take advantage. I was thinking ‘Duh’, but there are people out there that don’t know this stuff. Same with web standards - if *we* saw an article in a mainstream magazine or newspaper about acessible web sites that read “Hearing the web - how your web pages are being ‘read’ by blind people across the work!” we’d also think ‘Duh! That’s not news!’ but for a lot of people it really is. The challenge is getting that news to those people in an engaging and non-techy way that will enlighten and educate. That’s a big challenge, too.
I’m all for standards and even teach my coworkers the benefits of such. I can easily convince my bosses or clients why we should pursue them, but I advocate telling as few people as possible about them. As a standards aware web developer, I have now trimmed 50% of the field from competing with me. I take pride pride in the work I do, but it helps tremendously that there’s so many careless developers out there making me look better.
Damn I got some typos in that comment above. See if you can spot ‘em! ;-)
cosmin, i don’t think you understood the whole point of web stanbards. Sites built using web standards are not text based websites. Besides accessibility and web standards go hand in hand they are not the same thing.
From your understanding you’re saying any site which uses video/audio cannot be standards based.
I’m sure someone like Roger can explain better but to me it appears you haven’t understood web standards at all.
But on with the good, great article :) I’ve posted this and Robert Nymans’s articles to an HTML forum I read and was amazed that the people that are replying are all standards types. It just goes to show that this information is getting through to some people.
I spent about 5 years trying to convince companies about accessibility and at least 3 trying to convince them about web standards.
Then I just figured - why tell them? Many clients don’t care if I do an acessible, web standards site or not. So I just go ahead and build the site with web standards and tell them about it afterwards - I’ve never had a single person insist I change it back to a bad-ol tables design.
Now that the top 5-10% of the industry uses web standards as standard I think it’ll filter down, very slowly, to the rest of the industry.
The 50% of designers who are just in it for the money will start to NEED to learn web standards. Most blue chip clients ask for xhtml, css and AAA compliance - not because they care but because they like something they can “tick off”.
So, sooner or later, designers who want to be able to get “big money” doing corporate projects need to leard web standards.
It’ll take time, perhaps a long time, but it will happen sooner or later.
I run a rather mainstream webmaster forum and I can tell you that we come across these people all the time. The majority of new members to our forum haven’t got a clue that standards even exist. We do our best to gradually bring them up to speed.
We have found that slow and steady nudges are better than hitting them over the head with a malett and ordering them to comply. Sometimes it takes time but eventually many do come around. I think that agressive tactics used by some have served to further alienate people who were unsure about standards (such as the “unprofessionals” thread from last year). I know a few people who were really offended by that and it only made them more set in their ways.
Regarding tables for layout, I know some somewhat standards aware people who really don’t believe that tables for layout are wrong! They think that because they pass the validator, and the W3C hasn’t said anything explicitly against it, then they are okay. I’ve had endless, mind numbing debates about this. They don’t understand semantics either, and the finer points of validation.
I think we really need to work to bring this into the mainstream rather than confined in a rather enclosed community of people who already get standards. We’re working on that on our forum :)
help out a young naive beginner by helping me understand why I’m using only divs, why I spend so much time getting everything to validate, etc.
Well, as someone else said, you can’t fully answer that in a comments bit like that, but I’ll give it a quick shot.
Why divs instead of tables? Because tables are for tabular data. People should remember the ideal of the web is not to consider it just in terms of people viewing it in a modern graphical browser - it may need to be parsed by other computer programs (such as googlebot - see the google for vitamin example!) or read aloud by a screen reader. Whilst human eyes don’t really care if something is in columns created by divs or tables (they dont see the semantics of the markup underneath, only the result), computer programs and screenreaders do.
Why get everything to validate? Well, because if your code does not validate, you are inherently/implicitly relying on the browser’s error handling code, it’s ability to “guess” what you “really meant”. Which is a risky business, this is often not defined in the specs and therefore browsers tend to do very different things. Admittedly in practice they do different things with valid markup too, but hey…
On a more practical note, if you want reasons to convince management/clients of the benefits of this approach, you can point to decreased bandwidth and vastly increased ease of development and maintenance. Lots easier to tweak one css file than go through 50 html pages changing every tag from red to green. Financial reasons generally make even the most “I dont care about your standards” types pay attention ;-)
As for the article - I like it, sadly very true. I do my best to vocally stick up for the standards/css approach when I encounter people on forums asking about web dev stuff (I dont really frequent web dev forums, so this is when such topics come up on a general forum).
This is something I have been posting on recently as well (see the link in my name). I recently received the following comments from one of the listeners to my show:
“I know CSS has been around for quite a few years already - but the whole “web standards” bit is new to a lot of people. My point is basically that you and your podcasts are helping to educate the public and web designers about the importance of web standards in web design.”
For me this says it all. We still have a long way to go.
[…] We’ve spent over a decade finally getting the cruft out of pages. I’m not going to be sanguine about blithly putting more cruft back into the pages because we want a ‘cool’ effect. (For more on this, I recommend Roger Johansson’s Why Standards Still Matter.) […]
There Is Always A Way
I simply like to fine tune & expand onto my work, Standards are not a worry to me because if i cant
do it one way.. I will find another way..
As once said, A true work of art is never complete.
I stand by this, Hence we always have room to expand,
modify, change and redesign.
Code will never evolv if we dont push it to it’s limits
Ali,
Money isn’t everything, but in my experience, following a standards based approach to web development has definitely paid off.
I used to work for a very large corporation; the team I led implemented set of standards based sites for one of the business’s divisions. The sites were very well received. And, when we began showing metrics around performance and long term maintainability, while spreading the standards message, my team and I became celebrities within the organization. The recognition led to multiple awards and promotions with accompanying raises.
When we eventually left the organization, we entered the job market with skills that are very much in high demand. A lot of organizations recognize the value of standards based web development and are willing to pay top-dollar precisely because what Roger says is true: there are not enough developers out there who do standards and do them well.
So…yes, Ali, I say it will make you money if you follow web standards. But, that money won’t make you happy. Taking pride in your craft and the satisfaction of a job well done, however, just might.
May as well delete my other post since it looks like it’s seemingly just going to stay in the moderation queue:
I had written:
I fully agree. What I write about on my blog almost always seems to be focused on standards or accessibility. And my experiments site, while not all new and novel stuff, always takes accessibility to the hilt. I don’t just try to make stuff, I try to make good stuff and there’s a big difference. It bothers me that so many website plugins and add-ons are crappy in that regard.
Another thing I try to do via Accessites.org is to demonstrate to developers that standards-compliant and accessible sites don’t have to be ugly and boring. As people realize this then maybe they will start trying to make them themselves. But if nobody tells them they may never know.
Developers don’t have to cross every “t†or dot every “i†to make a difference either. Hopefully I will be having a high-profile article published soon (but I don’t want to say where yet as I don’t want to jinx it) that will give developers some ideas about “Practical, Entry-Level Web Accessibilityâ€
[…] An article called “Why Standards Still Matter” was just published on the excellent developer resource “Vitamin” articulating these points and more. A great discussion ensues, with a lot of developer’s making some great points on both sides. […]
[…] OK, this post isn’t about the electrician capabilities of your average web designer. It’s my attempt at a metaphor. What I’m really talking about is the fact that standards-aware Web designers and developers are still a tiny minority of the people working in the Web business. So says Roger Johansson in his recent Vitamin article Why Standards Still Matter. The main focus of the article is that, even though the use of standards is growing amongst developers, we still need to do more. This doesn’t appear to be the opinion of some others though. Occasionally I hear mutterings from some people who seem to think enough has been said about best practices and that we should find something else to write about. Some say that Web standards aren’t important anymore, because most Web developers are already using them. […]
I’ll tell you the primary resistance I encounter in my crusade for standards compliance: Compatibility with old [read: dead] browsers.
Mind you, I realize the benefits of graceful degradation, but it’s very difficult to argue against my employer when he sees our site that I’ve recently redesigned with standards compliance, only to get a call from client-X complaining that the site “looks all screwy” on his beloved Netscape Communicator [or whatever], whereas it looked fine when it was made up of tables, images, and spacer gifs.
I can explain to my boss why ultimately it’s still for the better until I’m blue in the face, but at the end of the day, some client who’s too lazy or stupid to upgrade his browser - and who’s paying us a lot of money - isn’t happy. I’m currently making a site for a client who specifically requested standards design, and it turns out she uses MSN Explorer! MSN Explorer makes IE look like the damn W3C.
Therefore, I think that the first step in promoting standards is to promote browser awareness. People are doing a great job trumpetting why Firefox rocks, but really, what we really have to do is explain why using strandards-resistant browsers is bad. Because no matter how good Firefox is, as long as Joe User thinks his current browser is working, he probably won’t bother to change it.
I think the root of the problem is that the standards aren’t all easy enough to use. If it’s much harder to use the standards-based solution than a non-standards based solution, the latter is what will inevitably get taught (through whatever media) when people first meet these things because it’s easier to teach. You end up with a vicious circle.
I think it’s also useful if the people who standards matter to - who can’t view certain sites on their screenreaders or PDAs or whatever - try to mention this to the relevant site owners as that more likely to have an effect gradually than people like me saying to them that there are theoretical people out there who won’t be able to view their sites properly.
Bill hit it right when he says “taking pride in your craft”. That applies to a whole lot more than websites. I’d rather not work with someone who balks at the mention of standards. Not wanting to learn or adopt a new technique says a lot. (and not in a good way… ;)
Good article and comments, a nice evening read.
In the last year I’ve noticed big commercial companies have changed their websites from table layouts to div layouts (however, this is probably only because they upgraded their version of Dreamweaver). This is a start but there is still a long way to go. I still see plenty of
[div class=”spacer”] [/div]
Juliette: I would have to disagree and say that using standards is actually easier once you learn them. I would find it difficult to build a site in tables and presentational mark up. I’ve put the time in and it just comes naturally, I don’t really have to think about it as I code.
I love web standards :)
what are webstandards?
WWW specs? accessibility? cross-browser scripting? DOM? CSS? XML?
Who has the complete answer? Is it english assemby language?
[…] We’ve heard it all before and the recent article from Vitamin, Why Standards Still Matter addresses the fact that we, as modern web designers, are fairly sick of hearing about it. We’ve been reading about it for months or even years, and we are convinced already! But there are plenty of folks who aren’t. […]
Thanks for the article! Lots of good points in there, and in the comments.
It seems like a thankless job to keep up with modern web developments and best practices (good luck learning them in school around here), but one day people will care about this as much as I care about my craft.
Fighting the good fight in Indiana, heh.
@Will
@Will
Case against tables:
1) Slow layouting = slow devices suffer
2) Bad for adaptive layout depending on display/device.
3) Hard to do skinnable designs
4) Goes against semantic principles & accessability, as it isnt what it claims to be
5) Bloated html = higher bandwidth cost
I can’t praise enough the people that dedicate their time and energy into providing blogs, examples and thoughts on everything related to design, css, web standards, accessibility, usabilty…….You guys rock. For those of us who are working 24/7 in corporate or other environments it allows us to keep up-to-date on current thinking and constatnly expand and update our skills.
So many people are writing bad code, with little or no thought for who will be using the site or what it is intended for. I come across it every day across all sectors of the business world.
Let’s keep waving the flag and trying to do all we can to raise awareness of why this is a good thing, both for the developers and designers and the end user.
@ali
“Will it make me money if I follow web standards?”
Yes, depending on how you sell it. Often clients won’t care one bit if it’s standards compliant (I hope this changes over the next 5 years) so you have to sell the business advantages of compliant, accessible designs. Less bandwidth, more scalability etc. the list is endless.
Take this article and replace all the instances of “standards” with “Jesus” and reread it. Do it! You might see how the tone might turn some people off.
Unless you preach the benefits over the concept of “standards for the sake of standards,” people won’t listen. There are too many precious hours in life to be taken up by things that are of small consequence to a small number of people.
Mind you, I’m a standards-convert myself and have been for years, but the reasons for it are plain and simple (to me):
1. SEO. Search engines have become the world’s eyes. You should do everything you can to gain exposure through natural ranking. While it’s not the most important aspect of SEO by a long shot, if you have 2 of the same site - one with tables - one with properly written, semantic code and CSS, the latter will always win.
You can’t bash Google for not promoting standards. They only care about relevance. And if a tabled site is more relevant, that matters much more to a user. Also - for spam fighting purposes - Google gives much more weight (than they should) to old trusted sites, which are more often laid out in tables.
2. Size. Loading speed matters, a lot. BUT I hear the argument of “bandwidth/money” all the time when the reality of the matter is that bandwidth costs are not going to matter much at all unless you’re running ESPN or another HUGE site, which probably only applies to a handful of us. Bandwidth costs for most of us are negligible. What will matter is the quickness of your site to your users.
3. Easy to skin/update. As your site grows, it will become far easier to maintain. You can make sitewide changes to layout, colors, fonts, sizes, etc. No need to keep template files and update the whole site everytime you want to change something.
4. Shows up well on phones, pda’s, browsers, and any other client if you do your homework and design properly. Also eliminates the need for “printer-friendly version” pages which bloat your site, cause extra maintenance (and can be bad for SEO as well.)
Overall, I think it’s an easy choice, but sometimes the standardista do seem like they’re engaging in circle-jerk and self-aggrandizement, which hinders the cause. Slow and steady wins the race.
“Back-end programmers who don’t really want to touch client side programming, and let their IDE create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for them.” - So true! They don’t even know much of CSS and Standards on web! That’s what i experienced here at work. They’re all just relying using Microsoft Visual Developer. making ASP.NET pages which generates horrible tables! makes sense why Microsoft doesnt support much of standards. That’s what i think.
“Back-end programmers who don’t really want to touch client side programming, and let their IDE create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for them.”
Honestly - do people really do this still? I’m am so sick of people associating Visual Studio and ASP.NET with ugly websites. A terrible PHP/Rails/Python developer could also easily create an out of the box, ugly, spaghetti code site using dreamweaver or homesite or whatever.
[…] Here are two excellent articles on why it remains important for web developers who are interested in standards-based, accessible sites and applications to talk about it. In the words of Roger Johansson: […]
[…] Why standards still matter […]
I also agree with Roger’s suggestion for local meet-ups and, being inspired by Robert Nyman’s Geek Meet, I started the same in my city (Oradea, located in Romania).
The first meeting was a success!
Our second meeting will take place in October and it’s pretty cool!
some client just dont care about the standard, and see the benefit of using it.
and some ppl is using xhtml and still using table and passed the w3c validation, “Hey look i pass the validation so im using standard!!”
I work in a very large interactive agency as an FET, so its my job to integrate the designer’s vision with the back end programming. I fight hard to make accessible, modern, standards-compliant sites, but let me tell you, it’s an uphill battle. It’s not that the big agencies don’t know or care about standards–it’s the process.
The creative directors only care about making it look great and winning awards. They don’t want to sacrifice the glossy, high bandwidth print-style layouts to design a site that would could be created with only CSS. And then there’s the programmers…
It’s not that the people actually building the web pages don’t know or don’t care–we do! We just don’t usually have the power to do anything about it.
Web Standards? No such thing! I’d really like so see real discussions on Web Standards. The W3C only create recommendations. Is the browser you are using to view this ISO complaint? Maybe I’m naive to think there isn’t any ISO standard complaint browsers around? Yet, how is it that I see lot’s of requests on so called standards lists asking if their site works in browser x? Do you, or better yet, the browser builders, have a well worn copy of ISO/IEC 15445:2000 on their desk? Where are all the other ISO standards? And what about the ISO Certification process for browsers? The Web Standards won’t filter down into the mainstream until the standards and compliance certification exist.
Good post, gets the idea across very clearly! I constantly come up against problems with agencies who really don’t get accessibility or usability. It’s amazing the number of top 50 digital agencies in the UK who really couldn’t care less than to make a valid, standards based piece of markup.
Agree with Chris above however, some kind of official standard would be great. Would love to see Google integrate it’s accessible search algorithm into the main search engine, that would really put the cat amongst the pigeons as loads of high profile sites lost ranking and scrabble to get their code straight.
Web standards are elitist.
I’m sorry, but it’s true.
Also, when you consider that some CSS ’standards’ don’t work on the browser that 80% of people on the Internet use, using them can actually be worse for your site’s viewers.
Maybe one day we’ll all follow them, but they’re just not ready yet.
Unfortunately a lot of standardistas are extremely pedantic and will jump at the chance to rip someone’s HTML or CSS apart over the tiniest minutiae. This is the ugly side of standards that’s easy to find on the web. Typically resulting in the kind of attitudes you see from Matt here.
It’s sad because the real benefits of standards have nothing to do with not using tables, or perfect validation. The real benefits have nothing to do with elitism, but the bottom line. Using CSS with clean HTML means lower shorter development, lower bandwidth, and easier maintenance. Often times by significant percentages. In some cases I’ve worked with HTML that was so bad that the price of a development of a web application was over double what it should have been.
I started working with CSS 6 years ago, and made the switch to CSS for all my layouts 4 years ago. Before that I spent 7 years perfecting my table-based layout techniques. Although there is a steep learning curve to CSS, particularly around browser issues, don’t fool yourself into thinking that table-based layouts are any better. You may have more experience with tables, but I have equal experience with both, and I can guarantee you that by using tables you are costing your company money in the long term.
Standards are not about elitism. I don’t care if my sites validate, and I’m not above using a table to lay things out if its simpler (forms for instance). Standards are all about the bottom line.
I definitely have to agree that it comes down to educating developers; or more importantly — managers. I recently designed several web applications for a Microsoft product that were then completely butchered with tables, frames, and non-valid html because the .Net developers have no background in web standards or css-based layouts. Even when the layouts were supplied as CSS/XHTML, the developers who will maintain the code prefer to have code (aka Tables) that they are used to.
Once managers see the importance of easy code maintenance with css/xhtml and the benefits of reusing semantic xhtml as a product evolves, the idea will sell better. Until then, it’s cheaper to tell the corporate customers that they need servers with more power and bandwidth, than spend the time creating a proper product.
This article really hits to home. I’ve been using Standards and clean markup for around 6 months, and I can’t believe how much my skills have inproved.
After reading Bulletproof web design by Dan Cederholm, everything really clicked. I couldn’t belive how much control you could have, if you just think for a couple minutes how you are going to position things.
Updating sites take no time at all and they load really fast. How can you go wrong with that.
Anyways, great article Roger
I for one think there’s enough books - so many authors write one book then just re-work it just to get another title out the door every year. I don’t know any other area of IT where you can get away with that to such an extent.
You know who you are!
[…] Last week there was a great article written by Roger Johansson in which he wrote about Why Standards Still Matter. Shortly thereafter another article was written by Robert Nyman who also had a few things to say about The Web Standards War. Both articles give a refreshing look into the area of writing about Web standards and the current response to doing just that. […]
In this context, I’d like to refer to Molly Holzschlag’s article What is a “web standard”?” that clears the confusion about W3C recommendations and best practices.
Purely visually oriented designers and Flash developers who … want the Web to be a purely visual medium, and approach it as if it was a printed brochure, a computer game, or television.
And who has the right to tell them they’re wrong? No-one owns the web. That is its single most important feature.
Yes, I generally write compliant code these days, but bible-bashing and tub-thumping tend to rub me up the wrong way.
Okay, for some reason that link got lost in translation; copy & paste for your reading pleasure: http://www.webstandards.org/2004/10/26/what-is-a-web-standard/
RE: Andy
So because someone ‘rubs you the wrong way’, you take the opposite extreme to create an unusable website? Thats not really proving any point - excepct ignorance (in my opinion). Its a childish response, ‘yeah, well, ill teach those standartistas, im gonna use ALL FLASH EVERYWHERE’ - that is the impression I get from your response.
No one owns the web, but it is a medium of communication. If you don’t want to communicate with a wider audience, then do what you want - by all means.
Take the time to become educated and learn about web standards (and even laws) - then you might not have the same childish response. In my experience, its the ignorant to web standards that bash web standards.
@Nate K,
I don’t think Andy was saying he would go out and create an unusable website just to ‘get back’ at anyone. I don’t see that anywhere in his post, and a quick check of his personal website seems to reveal that his work is indeed standards compliant. I think he was just pointing out that, as you list, the web is a medium of communication, and there are times when it may be appropriate to use Flash to communicate with your audience.
@Andy,
Having read Roger’s blog for years, I don’t think his post was directed as a shot at Flash developers in general…more of a shot at those who believe something should fly around the screen for the sake of flying around the screen. I’m sure we’ve all had clients or worked with someone who wanted the addition of Flash just for the sake of adding Flash to the page. I’m guessing that is more of the target Roger is thinking of.
As designers/developers, it’s our responsibility to create a product, (using whatever technology), that best serves our clients needs. Sometimes Flash might be an appropriate medium - sometimes you might have to get a client to realize a 5 minute Flash intro to their content-based news site might not be the best idea. I believe that was the main point Roger was getting at; but what do I know?
I’ve only been in the industry for just over two years and from reading DWWS right off the bat I’ve been using web standards and have constantly strived to learn more and to improve my skills - there are some REALLY great books out there right now. The biggest problem we’re finding is that communicating to clients the point of difference to the $500 knock-it-together with a free online site builder crowd is maddeningly difficult. Unfortunately, quality work in our trade is poorly valued by the client - price is king. I’ll keep going with standards as quite frankly its easier, more reliable and I prefer to do things the right way but improved awareness would certainly not hurt. And please no comments on our current site - I’ve learned a lot since it was launched and its due to be replaced, soon, really.
Wow. OK, let me clarify.
Distributing content-based sites using standards-compliant markup is one way to use the web.
Distribute visually-rich interactive experiences using technologies which don’t adhere to standards is another way to use the web.
The web is bigger than both of them, and my point was that this is surely a good thing. There’s room for everybody.
Replace “standards compliance” with christianity and “pure visually oriented design” with islam or judaism (or the other way round if you want), and you might see why I commented. Coding style is a very emotive issue (as you will have noticed!), and articles saying (effectively) “we’re right, they’re wrong, how should we convert them” run the risk of backfiring. Roger has (and should have) absolute freedom to express his view, but that works both ways.
I definitely reject the allegation of childishness (where did that come from?) - but I can accept that my meaning may not have been entirely clear.
Hi Andy - I see the point that you are trying to make, but I think you are missing the gist of what most of us mean when we harp on about standards.
I assume that by “purely visual” you mean that achieving the visual quality of the design is paramount and should not be sacrificed. I think it is a huge shame that you see “purely visual” and “standards based” sites as being opposite side of the coin. I really think that this is the issue here. It is my belief that they should be the same thing.
If, however, you really do mean “Purely” visual then we have moved away from your religious analogy and straight into one of segregation.
Hi Roger,
You can use me as an example of someone who thinks that there are too many books in the world about web standards. We only need 5 or 10, from the top designers (and thank goodness for them). I wrote about this recently: 99% of Web Design Books are Not.
Here’s a counterpoint to your insistence that standards are about being “clued in”:
The most successful sites in the world are not built to web standards. Take a quick look at the Top 500, for example, and try to validate them.
This suggests that there is very little effect on a positive user experience from web standards, as the most compelling experiences are built without them.
There are several reasons for this:
1) Browsers (UAs) still render content anyway
2) We can’t exclude those sites who don’t validate
3) It is entirely possible to build a horrible web site using web standards
4) Focusing on the user experience involves lots of things, and most of those things have little to do with intricacies of publishing
Now, I’m not advocating the opposite of your point. In fact, I would suggest that the best designers know about web standards and probably try their best to use them. But that’s not what makes them great designers. What makes them great designers is how they select and display content on the page. Not just the look, mind you, but the selection and distillilation of content and similar considerations as well.
As priorities go, standards aren’t high on the list when you’re talking about user experience. That’s why there isn’t a mass adoption like you want to see. In the future that may change, but the current situation is pretty clear.
[…] Die neueste Ausgabe (Nr. 224) von A List Apart versucht, jenen die Angst zu nehmen, die immer noch vor den so genannten Webstandards zurückschrecken. 12 Lessons for Those Afraid of CSS and Standards ist ein wichtiger Beitrag. Einige können das vielleicht nicht mehr lesen. Aber die “Wildnis” zeigt Tag für Tag - vielleicht auch Tägg für Tägg - dass es noch nicht an der Zeit ist, die Webstandards zu erklären und zu verteidigen. Täglich kann man erleben, welche negativen Folgen nicht valider und nicht effizienter Code hat. […]
Great article!
After learning Accessiblity, Usability, Designing wth web standard and all these stuff, i have started to realised what kind of craps i used to make in the name of websites!!
This site actually produces a warning, does that count as invalid code? :-P
Web Apps (20) produces:
line 116 column 9 - Warning: escaping malformed URI reference
But heck, Google itself doesn’t have a doctype on the search page - and 4 other errors. :(
Thanks everybody for reading and commenting. Sorry for taking so long to respond. If only there were more hours in a day… I’ll try to address some comments, and since there is no comment preview I hope I get things right.
Ken:
“So I think it’s a little pie-in-the-sky to expect any company to invest time and money in re-training, when it will do nothing for their bottom line.”
You don’t think quicker development and easier maintenance will do anything for their bottom line? Dealing with valid, semantic, and well-structured markup saves tons of time. The problem is that the companies you mention don’t know that.
Hayden:
“people that use CSS are only trying to be cool”
Haha! That’s a good one :-).
Sean: A bit of search engine marketing would perhaps be a good thing, along with actively trying to write articles that will eventually replace the old ones that teach outdated methods.
Richard: Agreed, there is little or no need to talk to your clients about Web standards specifically. Do let them know about the benefits they get from having you build their site though.
Nathan:
“I’m am so sick of people associating Visual Studio and ASP.NET with ugly websites”
Yeah, but unfortunately the vast majority of ASP.NET developers don’t seem to even look at the so-called HTML and CSS the Visual Studio + ASP.NET combo produces. There are exceptions, of course.
p auL:
“I’m sure we’ve all had clients or worked with someone who wanted the addition of Flash just for the sake of adding Flash to the page. I’m guessing that is more of the target Roger is thinking of.”
Yes, that’s correct.
[…] Now, don’t get me wrong … this wasn’t exactly a shock … I’ve seen this coming for a while. Sure a few years ago - hell even one or two years ago - I felt like I was sittin’ real pretty with all my CSS knowledge. I was considered an “expert” by many, I felt like I was ahead of the curve and that I had a lot to share with others, I had designs in the CSS Zen Garden for God’s sake! ;~) Now, even though clearly the battle is not over, I’m feeling like there’s not a hell of a lot for me to talk about any more in the way of what the focus of my blog has always been - examples off CSS challenges and triumphs in the real world. […]
It’s easy to be turned off by web standards because of the anal nature of validators. For instance, let’s say I have something like this:
<img src = /images/foo.gif border = 0>
This markup will create about a million error messages in any validator. But look at the advantages it has. Because there are no quotes, you can’t forget to close them. Since the strings contain no spaces, no browser that I know of will be in any way confused. And since the img tag was self-closing in the original HTML spec, why make things harder for people by changing that?
The original HTML spec, or at least all web browsers I know of, recognized that people were creating documents, and people were human and unless there was a darn good reason for it, there was no reason to be anal about rules.
Now, all of a sudden, we’re being told to be anal about rules, and I’m just asking: “For what?” Who gains from this? Why is the markup I wrote above, which is perfectly readable from both a human and a machine perspective, wrong?
Furthermore, this markup is still unambiguous; there is not one browser that I know of that will not render it correctly.
So nowadays someone will rip me apart for using this kind of markup, with the tact and grace of a pack of hyenas ripping up a carcass. And again I ask, why? If all browsers can read it, and it’s easier for humans to read and write, then isn’t it actually … better markup, really?
Why can’t the language evolve to make things easier for people, instead of making it harder for people to read and write? Is the language not our tool, our servant, instead of the other way around?
I’ve read books about web standards and wasted hours trying to get multi-column layouts work as I want them, with the background color extending down to the bottom of the page in each column.
I have read about hideous workarounds that are no more semantic than tables. One book said that I should use a repeating background image to get table colors right. What if I want the user, not me, to pick the colors? And once you add the size of the image to the size of the code, it’s not even clear to me that the CSS-based layout is smaller than tables. It might even be larger and slower to load.
I guess I should have dropped $100 on a massive stack of books so I could learn this stuff, but what’s the point if I can code what I want in tables in five minutes, as opposed to five hours trying to use “web standards” and still not having it work?
Finally, what’s semantic markup, really? A table means I want to line something up in columns. What’s a div mean? A division of a document, or in other words, nothing; less even than table.
My site is table-based but uses CSS for color and spacing. It has what I think is a very nice system to chew up a color scheme designed for myspace and spit it out in my format. My feeling is that this sort of thing, while not “politically correct” is what the broader public wants. And I am designing for the public, not for standards ideologues.
Unlike many of my fellow table users, I care deeply about the web and about the creative aspects of producing a web site.
But I’m not sure if well-designed table-based layouts are any less piggish than the endless amounts of cryptic CSS needed to make multi-column layouts work. And in any event, one img will wipe out the difference.
I will say that validators are useful because if your HTML is doing something really strange, the easiest way to find the mistake is to run it through a validator. But to spend hours and hours adding quotes and closing tags to sites that worked perfectly well without them strikes me as an enormous waste of time and energy, in a time when both of them are short.
I took my site and accessed it on my T-Mobile Sidekick cellphone. Much to my surprise, table layout and all, it worked quite well. There might be some programming changes I’d make, like leaving out the sidebar or moving it when I see that a phone browser comes a calling. But on the whole, it didn’t look like my table-based layout would be significantly different in accessibility than a non-table based layout.
And finally, please, raise your hand if you’re blind. I’ll bet blind web users represent 1% or less of people on the web and yet we’re being asked to devote huge amounts of time for them, putting in alt tags and the like. Maybe I just don’t like this age when catering to the handicapped takes such a huge bite out of society, from parking places that are always empty to ramps that are never used. I’d rather devote 99% of my effort to 99% of my customers than devote 20% of my effort to 1%, as you folks seem to be urging.
Overall, then, it seems like you are guardians of an ideology that doesn’t care about the end user (unless they are part of that privileged “handicapped” class), or about making the lives of the creators of web sites easier instead of harder.
I care deeply about building a high-quality site, but my metric is how much users like it. And I don’t think making it validate is going to change their experience one jot.
And there’s your problem.
D
I agree with David.
If some seriously deranged VC throws one hundred million ber-gillian dollars at an engine that takes spaghetti code and marks it up as beautiful, semantic XHTML and CSS (and very possibly any scripting language you can throw at it as well) then everybody that reads AListApart and the likes of would be diminished to either JUST graphics designers or JUST web designers. Gone would be the web envangelista or standardista.
I work for a software company (a LARGE one) and standards are not a factor that’s threatening our sales, profits, bottom-line etc. The masses haven’t adopted it. It’s been years now. Save a child in Africa, hey save a whale if that’s your thing, but educating designers and developers on web standards isn’t going anywhere. There’s an elite few who support this trend and they’re basically stroking each other’s egos. Pretty pictures, rounded borders, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement, weapons of mass destruction…
Let’s all do something REALLY useful today…and Recycle so that at least we’ll have a cleaner greener earth in which to practice our web standards in peace and harmony. It’s over boys. Give it a rest!
I don’t pretend to be a standards expert or perfect adherent to them. But I do think it is wise to have a keen understanding of all the tools at your disposal. Understanding web standards lets you choose the right tool for the right job from a large array of techniques. Simply tossing up your arms in exasperation and saying it doesn’t work or it’s worthless isn’t the best way to sharpen your own skills.
The company I work for cares not at all about standards. They do not even care about the money-oriented reasons for using them. (All they care about is low wage countries… another story.) But they also do not care how I write my code. So if I can write code to the standard and have it meet my own needs then they are fine with that. So long as it works.
Meanwhile, some agencies do hire me for what I know about web standards and I’m happy to make all that extra cash on the side.
I totally agree — I frequently search my local and international competitor websites and browse their portfolios. Just want to see what everyone is doing you see… (maybe I gloat and bitch a little)
Thing is, I see a tonne of table-based layouts that look like they were designed in print. Or they were designed by visually-oriented people in photoshop without much regard for the technical considerations.
Of the few that I do see that use CSS and standards-based design, they aren’t even close to accessible. All fixed-pixel layouts, improper semantics, poor document flow, and really, really, really bloated and bad CSS.
It’s so very rare to see decent standards-based and accessible work out there. It’s pretty much exclusively relegated to specialized sites and portfolios of our small cadre of specialized developers.
Good suggestions on spreading the word.. we need to stop preaching to the choir and spread the word to the people who need to hear it. The vast majority of web developers.