Bold, yet true?

September 05, 2002 | 0 Comments

The statement: 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete. The author: Jeffrey Zeldman for Digital-web.

First off, let me state for the record that I’m very cranky, should be in bed and anything below this word may be retracted (but not removed) at a later date.
Secondly, let me say I can’t wait to read the rest of the book when it comes out, and third, I understand where he is coming from and I’m right there with him almost everyday - I was yesterday, and I will be tomorrow. Today, well, lets just say I had a rough one. So - let me play the devil’s advocate here.

I spent my whole day today back in 1997 - using FrontPage to clean up our intranet at work in preparation for the addition of a long overdue, and much needed search engine. I’ll not get in to why I had to use FrontPage - that is a whole new post. What I will say is this: For many of us, down in the trenches on a day to day basis - Web standards are great in theory, but frankly damn near non-existent in practice.

I wish the browsers were perfect - I really do. I wish that all my sites would work in every browser - all the time. I wish I were in Hawaii. I read a post over at What Do I Know? today where Todd Dominey talks about how “Browsers are applications that should function according to the same constraints as any interpreter of a programming language.” And how languages become open to interpretation. Well, yeah. The rules are loose, and I agree that we might have an easier time of it if HTML was as strict as C++. But it’s not.

The page you are lookin at looks great in IE 6.0. It has anywhere from minor to major problems with it’s display in many other browsers. I don’t have time to fix them all right now, but I plan to do my best when I do have time to get them fixed. For now it’s enough that the majority of my readers see the site as intended and the rest at least get the content. It’s an improvement.

At work - I can’t wait for the browsers to be perfect, but I do what I can and move on.

In the trenches I’m constrained by many things. Not just the browsers. The content management tool we are using doesn’t write anything near standard code, and there is nothing I can do about it, but I do what I can and move on. I have to worry about problems I would have thought solved years ago, but the Web moves at different paces for different people. Obsolete, or “broken”, is a point of view. The organization I work for has awesome content, and isn’t that what it’s really about? Technologywise, are we obsolete? You bet!

On our intranet there is so much FrontPage bullshit that if we pulled it, the whole thing would fall apart - so we’re stuck with it for now. Nothing I can do about that. You see where I’m going with this? It’s the Web, this is what we do. We jury-rig, bandaid, patch and tinker and hope for the best. We wait for browsers to implement standards, we learn, grow and plan and we do the best to get set up for the future. We read Zeldman, and Nielsen, and McGovren. We try and tell people in our organiztions about Web standards, writing for the web, information architecture and accessibilty - more often than not to deaf ears who just don’t care and don’t have time to understand. Our skills and our stuggles are mocked at times, simply misunderstood - or looked at in awe. Yeah, we love those people.

Anyway - I tend to doubt if you average Web professional cares about this stuff at all. As long as the work gets done. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure they would care, it’s just they don’t know or simply don’t have time. It’s quite a bit of work - keeping on top of the Web.

Does anyone outside of 2 or 3 people at my organiztion care about Web standards? Nope - or at least, not yet, but I’m working on it, and it really doesn’t matter if they care or not. I’ve got them covered. No, to them it’s really not important how things work. They just want things to work. And until there is a better option, that is what they are going to get - but I’ll be doing what I can, when I can and hopefully, someday, none of our sites will be obsolete.

Filed under: Web General