Even More Standards Evidence

November 20, 2003 | 0 Comments

I’m on my lunch break right now, right in the middle of re-coding the templates for our Intranet to a tableless CSS based layout, but taking a break to catch up on news, etc. I just read Ethan’s Better living through standards and thought I’d tack on a few of my thoughts from recent experiences.

Right now I’m working on the Intranet templates and as I’m fully ensconced in Microsoft country, both figuratively at the office and literally at home, you might be wondering why we would bother going with a tableless, Web standard, CSS + XHTML template when we have “control” over the Intranet and our users browser.

I know I wondered the same thing, and made the mistake of pushing the issue aside, but the fact of the matter is that as much as a hold as MS has here, they may not have that hold forever. As well, our particular Intranet seems to be growing outside of the virtual “wall” of the company. We now have users on Macs at sister institutions, for example.

Both of these are solid reasons to go with standards as it should make our sites better for folks outside of our company’s golden image of Internet Explorer. In any case, as far as the browser goes, it can’t hurt.

The main reason we’re doing this now, is that based on lessons learned from our external Web sites redesign, we’ve really come to realize the benefits of having a flexible, standards-based design when you need to make changes or adapt your site and it’s content to other purposes.

For example, we want to make some of our site easier for content contributors to update and have decided to go with a Movable Type solution. Putting the current, nested-table template and porting our legacy content into MT would have been a nightmare, let alone then taking that content or template out at a later date. Similar to Ethan’s rant, we’ve seen this to be true and would hate to deal with that down the road.

Luckily I don’t have it as bad as he does, at least not yet. When we get to porting content over I’m in for a huge mess, but for now the basic templates and main pages aren’t that bad. This is due in large part to some work I was able to do on the last iteration of the Intranet. It wasn’t 100% tableless and it didn’t validate, but it was a big step in the right direction. Thank goodness.

Having said that, I really wish I would have gone all the way back then. At the time I figured that since we’re stuck with IE for the foreseeable future, it didn’t really matter how “standard” our Intranet was. That was about 9 months ago and I’m now realizing that a little bit of time spent then would have saved me quite a bit now. I was being very short-sighted as it turns out.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. The evidence is out there and it’ll keep on coming. As Ethan says “it’s not worth working without web standards any more.”

Filed under: Web General