No time for valid standards.

October 12, 2002 | 0 Comments

The other day I talked about how I’d love to do a fully standards compliant redesign of the hospital’s external Web site - but that it’d be tough because of the CMS system we use. In fact I’ve bitched about this before - standards are a sticky issue with me.

While this is true, and I’m sure we’d never get it to validate with the W3C, I am going to give it a shot and get at least as much as I can into XHTML and CSS without the pages breaking too badly. One of the reasons why I don’t think I’ll get it to the point that it will validate is the issue I have with time.

It’s the same reason I don’t worry all that much about if asterisk* validates all the time. This is about content and I do it in my spare time. I have a full time job, and an active non-Web life as well. I simply don’t have the time to make sure this thing validates all the time.

Zeldman today spoke about this. He refered to an editorial by Joe Clark. Joe mentions that “It should be amusing that a staff of hundreds cannot achieve valid HTML while some guy futzing around at his computer can #150; yet again.” Well - I’m some guy who can’t seem to futz enough. I’m a designer at heart, I care about the way it looks. I had to go against a full CSS site to get this to display correctly in Mozilla. Now I’m sure there is a CSS way to do it, but I don’t have time to figure that out at the moment. Let alone get it to validate - at one point it did. Oh well…

I digress. Down at the hospital we have to use a CMS - for all sorts of reasons. And for what it’s worth, it’s not a bad system. It’s simple and does what we need. Yet, it will be a barrier to moving forward with Web standards and I doubt anything can be done about it. It’s too bad. It all comes down to time - if there is any left, then and only then is when I’ll think about making sure the site validates.

Hopefully something is better than nothing. Zeldman is right. It’s not hard to code for valid XHTML, CSS and Priority 1 accessibility. It is a challenge to get it to validate all the time. Even for me, the guy futzing away on his computer (albeit a new and really sexy one) on a Saturday afternoon. I gotta get out!

Filed under: Web General