Why Not Web Standards?
March 09, 2004 | 
55 Comments
If you were to go snooping about the archives of this site you’d undoubtedly find quite a few posts about Web standards. Many of these posts express various frustrations and questions I’ve had over the last few years about adopting Web standards.
I’ve come along way, but it’s not always been easy. At this point in time I do try and support the latest Web standards whenever possible with my sites. I do recognize that this isn’t always the practical thing to do, so in that regard I’m still in a transitional phase when it comes to Web standards support. I imagine many of you are in the same boat.
Many more are probably still struggling with Web standards adoption in the first place. Lets face it, the adoption of Web standards has come very far but it seems pretty obvious to me, mainly by the lack of Web standards compliant sites out there, that there is still along way to go.
I’m very curious as to why people have shied away from Web standards. I’m very interested in hearing from people who either don’t support Web standards at all or are still struggling with it.
I can see many, many reasons why someone might not make the jump, either full or in part, to supporting Web standards. Maybe you work with technologies or tools that aren’t exactly standards friendly. Maybe you don’t feel it’s worth the effort. Maybe, like many developers up here in Seattle, you’re working with non-standard, IE only techniques. Maybe you just can’t seem to get your mind around it. Or, maybe, you just don’t know where to start.
(Maybe you think those who support Web standards are anal retentive code dorks with nothing better to do.)
These are valid reasons and you may have strong arguments to support them. I imagine there are equally strong (or stronger) arguments for the adoption of Web standards that could be applied to many of these cases.
I understand that, for many, Web standards support, especially if you choose to support the latest and greatest, can be daunting. I often see posts and articles telling folks why they should support Web standards and most of the arguments made are very good. What I don’t see a whole lot of is articles addressing concerns with Web standards support and tailoring those great arguments to individual situations.
Chances are, if you read my site on a regular basis and have made it this far into this post, you’ve got at least some interest in Web standards. I’d also bet many of you don’t currently support Web standards or are maybe just getting started. I’d like to hear from you. Tell me why you don’t or what you see as barriers to your Web standard support.
Don’t be shy, if your a lurker, newbie or first time commenter, please, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts. You might get some good advice. If you are someone who is all for Web standards and want to comment, that’s fine to, but please try and be respectful and understanding of those folks who haven’t yet joined us on the bandwagon.
Filed under: Web Development
Comments
1. Derek said:
I’ve been coding all my sites with standards for the last 4 or 5 months, but no one else I know seems to care one bit. That includes real life contacts as well as people online. There seems to be a small group of “elite” web designers that push web standards to each other back and forth, but the vast, vast, vast majority of web designers seem to not care at all in my experience. True, many of these are fly-by-night mom & pop shops that buy (or pirate) a copy of dreamweaver and call themselves web designers. But they should really be included in the web designer group, because to the general public they are web designers. The public doesn’t know any better, so they pay the Dreamweaver operators to build them a site. To those types of designers there is little incentive to learn new, better techniques because they are making money and building sites without even knowing HTML. Why should they care? Their clients don’t care, and don’t know why they should care.
If web designers and design firms started losing sales to their competitors because they didn’t code with web standards, you can bet there would be a lot more interest in it. The problem is educating potential web site owners about how to choose a skilled web designer that will give them a good site and will make them some money. They need to be taught to ask for their site to be coded with web standards, and to not settle for someone that doesn’t offer that.
But of course that is a huge problem. All of the standards-related articles on the web are for the most part aimed at developers. I’ve never seen a really good resource that you could send a business owner to to educate them on web design, and what they should be looking for in a web designer. Even if that site existed, it would be difficult to make the general public aware of it unless they got on Google and searched for “how to pick a web designer” which hardly anyone does, I would imagine.
Most web designers are hired because someone “knows a computer person”, and the business owner, not knowing any better, blindly accepts that person for a web professional and hires them to do their site. There is little to no research involved, in my experience.
Of course I have only dealt with small businesses, never large corporations. I expect the climate there is much different. But the small businesses are the ones getting screwed by amateur web designers, and they are the ones that need to be educated somehow. But I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. :\
Posted on March 9, 2004 08:55 AM | #
2. Jeremy Flint said:
I am the senior web designer at my job (the only designer, as a matter of fact). I first discovered standards after reading about the Wired redesign. I quickly threw myself into learning more about it. Why it was beneficial to use standards, as well as the reasons why not.
I first designed sites using transitional methods, which was a good thing because the first site that I redesigned after starting to use standards still had a fairly significant userbase on netscape 4. So i wrote clean tables and used CSS to control fonts and padding and colors and such.
Now I am doing full CSS layouts using XHTML. However, many of our existing sites that we have maintenance contracts with are written using tables and font tags. When I have to go into one of those sites to make changes, I wonder how I ever wrote such garbage. I often find myself adding <font size: 2px> because I am so accustomed to writing CSS rules now.
The hardest part about converting to standards is convincing co-workers that the change is benficial. Sometimes the project manager wonders why it may take an hour to add something using CSS that could have easily been done with a table.
In my opinion, being standards compliant doesn’t necessarily mean switching to an all CSS layout and using XHTML to markup the structure. Standards compliance can just as easily be acheived using a table and HTML 4.01. XHTML makes standards compliance easier because the ruleset is more strict.
Posted on March 9, 2004 08:56 AM | #
3. Daryl said:
I was going to propose that somebody start up a site called, say whywebstandards.com to educate the public/clients, but it turns out that such a site already exists and is set to be filled with content this month. I’d say that such a site run independently of a given single Web shop and providing case studies, etc., could be pretty valuable as far as showing clients why they should choose standards-compliant developers.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:06 AM | #
4. Keith said:
Jeremy – You bring up a good point that I am well aware of. You don’t have to go with XHTML and CSS to support Web standards. That is a common misconception.
Also, you should tell that PM that an hour spent now could save countless hours down the road.
Derek – working with people who don’t support standards or don’t care is part of the reasons I posted this. Down at my day job our sites are all built with Web standards in mind. However, our main external site wasn’t built to the level of standards I’d have liked.
This was because the people we hired out to design it argued against Web standards. I don’t feel they fully understood what it was they were arguing, but hey, that’s another story. What they went with dictated, for a few reasons, that we develop with a more transitional approach.
I hope to address this in the future, but I just don’t have time. The site is still (usually) valid and standard compliant – it’s just not taken as far as I’d have liked. Consequently we don’t reap some of the benefits of having all of our presentation done with CSS for example.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:10 AM | #
5. Keith said:
I find myself often conflicted with web standards issues. I’m currently working on a redesign of my personal site, and I was hoping to make it more CSS / XHTML compliant with this attempt. I work as an Art Director for a medium sized ISP and most of my work and experience has been with table style layout. The switch is a little daunting for me because of all the new (to me at least) things I have to take into consideration, when making my design. I have to relearn ways to make layouts, that I already know how to do in tables, so it is a little frustrating. It’s hard to dump all that previous experience and replace it with something new. I have to say though that I’ve found the CSS community to be very helpful in general, so it is making the transition easier.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:12 AM | #
6. Derek said:
whywebstandards.com will hopefully be a good resource, but again, how are you going to get that to the people that need to see it? They aren’t going to go on Google and search for “Why should my site use web standards”. They don’t have any idea what web standards are.
And if a designer sends the client to that site, they are already aware of web standards and will be coding the cilent’s site with them. If a business owner is approached by someone that could care less about the code or their site being compatible with every browser and device, they would not be sending them to that site so the client would still be ignorant to web standards and how to choose a good designer to work with.
I think a site like that should cover a lot more than just web standards as well. It should cover search engines, marketing, choosing a designer that will be around for a while and not just dump a site on the internet and leave it there to rot. Why you shouldn’t hire your 13 year old nephew to represent your business to the world, etc. But again, how do you get the word out without paying for ads in business magazines, newspapers, etc? I still don’t know. :)
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:18 AM | #
7. Britt said:
I agree a lot with what Derek said, and, like Jeremy, I am the only web person for the medium-sized engineering company I work for.
I made the switch to web standards and sold the company on it, relating it to our actual engineering work, which is full of standards. It was an easy sell.
Recently, I was involved in helping someone choose a web firm for a redesign of a related web site. None of the proposals mentioned anything about web standards. The example sites I checked out were mostly default Macromedia product-built sites. The code showed no sign of human intervention.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:19 AM | #
8. patricia said:
Design and coding, for me, is just a hobby. I learned the hard way, using only notepad in the beginning because I wanted to handcode everything (still do). Because I picked up my information willy-nilly, from a book here, a Web site there, and the focus was on getting my site to look the way I wanted, web standards didn’t really come into play for me. I worried, of course, that the site looked good in the newer browsers, but some things were (are) beyond me.
In reading you and others regarding web standards, I am totally willing to drink the Kool-Ade and often consider rebuilding/designing my site to make it compliant. but at this point it just seems like such a daunting task. Especially when it’s a personal site that only a few people visit and nobody else in my group cares one bit whether my pages or theirs are compliant.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:23 AM | #
9. DarkBlue said:
The biggest barrier as I see it is that the majority of clients don’t know or care about web standards. More and more clients are aware of accessibility issues these days though, so the overall level of understanding should increase.
Most designers work under time constraints that are prohibitive to the web-standards code/validate/test cycle.
Designers use tools for development that don’t promote good, standards-compliant output.
Many CMS’s aren’t standards-aware aware - how many times do we see sites break on validation only because of CMS-generated “&”s in URLs?
Even when the conditions are (almost) perfect, there are still many gotchas that can catch the unwary developer.
For myself, I am work under very favourable conditions: I have written a standards-compliant CMS and the vast majority of my customers are in the education sector. These ARE customers who are aware of the benefits of standards-compliance, in fact - they insist upon it.
I work closely with the web designers to create standards-compliant websites for schools, colleges and other educational establishments. The entire team is standards aware, CSS aware and used to coding in XHTML (albeit in “transitional” form). You would think it would be virtually impossible for such a team to put a non-compliant live… however, even under these very best conditions things still go wrong.
We have produced sites where the client has insisted on using third-party components that don’t comply, or they want a cross-browser, multi-level drop-down-menu, or they want a Flash-based navigation system, and so on… There are just so many things that can result in the dreaded validation error.
Of course we always advise clients when we’re in these situations, offering alternatives where appropriate. But, despite their initial insistance on compliancy, many choose to continue with their broken sites because they look pretty, or whatever.
In the real world we have to comply with the client’s wishes. So we create as much valid and compliant output as we can - we make do.
It’s a shame, but I fear the situation will continue until a threshold is reached - which will be when most contempory sites are fully standards compliant to be non-compliant becomes generally frowned upon. Obviously then, we’ve have a long wait ahead.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:28 AM | #
10. Gabe said:
Even though it’s not directly related to standards, I often use search engine optimization as a description of how I markup pages. My argument for good semantic markup is that it is search engine optimization for the future. Just look at the people have spent so many millions optimizing sites to trick search engines like Altavist, but where are they now? Probably blacklisted on Google. The goal of a search engine is to find relevant content, so if you markup your content cleanly and descriptively, you are optimizing for the same goal as the search engines which will likely benefit you in the long run.
The core benefits of standards such as maintainability and abstraction of presentation are very hard to communicate to most clients. If you feel confident communicating in-depth technical decisions to them, go for it, but for me I usually just say ‘it’s quicker to build and maintain this way’ and maybe throw in a concrete example relating to changing styles or something.
One other thing that may work for some clients is showing that their page validates and giving them the bookmarklet. A few checks of how many sites DON’T validate quickly gives the client the same elite feeling that we all know and love without having to understand why :)
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:30 AM | #
11. Micah said:
The main reason to use web standards is cross-platform/cross-browser compliancy, so it’s pretty much a value judgement: Do I want to sacrifice some element of design for all A users so that my site will look better for all B users? What if B users are a small group, and are used to sites breaking?
One of the issues with standards, however, is that they’re supposed to be, for lack of a better phrase, “beyond time.” A standards-compliant site should look almost exactly the same in a decade or two. So that’s another issue, but if you’re one of those people that redesigns every year, maybe it isn’t.
That’s why I put a little bit of work into make my sites *somewhat* standards compliant, but, ultimately, a website is designed to be viewed, and it should be designed with the viewers in mind.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:35 AM | #
12. Wade Winningham said:
I did a site recently which needed to be viewable on handhelds in addition to the web and in my research for doing this found and fully embraced CSS and web standards.
Just this past weekend a guy I know who has designed some sites in the past mentioned that he pretty much designs sites in PhotoShop and just exports it as a web site then adds whatever javascript he needs to add.
Some don’t see the benefit right away because visually, the various methods should display the same results. This is only a narrow view, though, that doesn’t take accessibility into account all the time.
For business people who are not developers, the only time I’ve ever run across any that knew anything about web standards only knew of them because they had a corporate policy that their sites should pass w3c checks. Generally, these are large companies. Small to medium companies I think rely more on the designer to give them what they need.
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:36 AM | #
13. Steve said:
Most of the reason for my interest in, but failure to support web standards, is tied to the fact that I’m still a rookie when it comes to web design. I’ve never built a site by pure hand-coding and I don’t know many of the skills required to handle validation, CSS, XHTML, etc. I also am still struggling with Movable Type fundamentals. I’ve got a great many good ideas, but it seems it costs me $400 with a designer/developer every time I want to do something.
I’ve read Jeffrey Zeldman’s book and would love to have all the know-how it takes to design a MT weblog complete with custom-designed templates. Finding available time to do those kinds of things rather than simply to post entries is also a challenge. Recently, I learned that there is some flaw in Movable Type that causes nearly every one of my entries to be non-validating.
Anyhow, the short answer to why I’m not standards compliant is “I’m a rookie.”
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:46 AM | #
14. Kevin Davis said:
Ugh. This stuff is difficult! I’ve been trying to produce some very demanding layouts for my personal site and these layouts usually have compatiability issues even with modern browsers.
So far, however, with client work, I have been able to produce sites that conform to standards, use CSS for the layout and still maintain consistency among the modern browsers (opera 6,7, webcore, gecko, IE5,6, IE/mac, etc.).
That isn’t to say my record is perfect by any means.
The “old methods”, that, to a large extent were invented by David Siegel, work very well. Using a spacer gif with a width of 60px nested within a table cell will give you a margin of 60px across the board. The whole industy’s focus on backwards-compatiability leads designers to throw out notions of seperation and accessibility.
In the end, I believe that web design is still dealing with its baggage from the print world. In print design, the designer creates one comp that, when adjusted for the proper color profiling, yields an identical proof across the board. The concept of meta-data never existed in the print world.
Some day soon, perhaps, the whole industry will adopt new workflows that conform to this medium. On a team, one needs people who care about the raw data, who care about the implementation and accessibility of that data by various devices, and finally those who care about the principals of visual design (then we can add in illustrators and flash developers).
The technology is not yet mature enough to make such goals into a reality. To push this technology forward, I would hope that the industry begins pointing fingers at device manufacturers, and questions their standards-compliance, rather than expecting designers to solve the short-comings of these manufacturers.
We can hope, however, that the momentum from sites now converting to standards-based layouts is pushing the industry in this direction.
I suppose we just need to keep yelling. If more designers begin to engage in discourse over these new technologies, there will be a greater chance they will band together (under current design associations or new ones) and give themselves the political power to make changes. The challenge, of course, is to keep an open mind amidst all this.
Just random thoughts.
-Kevin
Posted on March 9, 2004 10:13 AM | #
15. Mike said:
I’ve been doing the web standards thing for a living for about a year now so this is my view from the rock-face. I’ve been fortunate enough to get a lot of freelancing from a forward-thinking nm agency who are currently attempting to convert their developers to CSS and XHTML with Accessibility fitted as standard. They’ve had quite a lot of luck convincing their clients to dump 4th Gen browsers but they have account managers who talk people into and out of things for a living. The amount of time required to educate clients is significant and you need to have a certain reputation behind you to buy you that time. Would a client sit and be lectured by a solo freelancer? Hmmmmm.
As far as I can see, the biggest barrier to adoption is knowledge. From a client point-of-view it’s the benefits that sell the idea, and that’s not so bad - they’re obvious once they’re explained. The other side is programmer knowledge. An experienced programmer could have a flick through a couple of books and start writing standards-compliant code within a day or two, no trouble. Understanding the syntax isn’t all that hard. The tough bit is converting yourself into a walking browser-bug encyclopedia. I’ve been at this a while now and I’m still learning new ones all the time. That’s what keeps it interesting though! [geek]. You need a fairly hefty memory to remember all the bugs and you have to be able to run through those potential problems in order to evaluate the path of least resistance to your goal.
That’s all well and good if you’re developing as well as designing because you can tailor your design to fit what you think is possible. Incidentally, I reckon that’s probably why a lot of CSS sites look very similar - the best known bugs and the best known workarounds tend to lead everyone down the same road. When I first started working with specialist web designers that’s when I really started to understand where the problems and limitations of CSS lay. Why can’t these items vertically aligned to each other? Why is IE5/Mac only displaying these list markers some of the time? etc etc. Those limitations have to be explained to the designers too and they have to remember them. But not too well, or everyones sites would become identical…!
I was asked to write some training material for an agency last year and I split the course into five: developers, designers, account managers, css gotchas and a case study - hoping to address the four main areas where knowledge of the subject is required and then a final piece to show it in action. That took me a while to write and it was only possible because the agency was prepared to invest in acquiring the knowledge. It was a significant investment in both time and money to reach the stage where they could offer web standards as a service. If you don’t have money to spare, you need extra time for the learning. Would clients paying 50K for a site be happy if their nm agency delivered them a half-baked standards site that only worked in IE? Nope. Not at all.
Long story short - the main barrier to adoption of web standards, as I see it, is the amount of education required in all parts of the industry and that carries with it significant cost in time and money.
Sorry, this has come out sounding like a lecture meeting a rant. Many apologies! Feel free to disagree with anything in this comment…
Posted on March 9, 2004 10:17 AM | #
16. Keith said:
Ahh, Kevin? For being hard you sure did a great job. I mean, really. Yours are some of my favorite examples of beautiful Web standards CSS-based designed.
I do hear you. This site itself was quite a pain at times.
You make some good points.
Hey, does anyone else find it a tad ironic that the title of this post is “Why Not Web Standards” when there is a mention of a new (and hopefully very interesting and useful) site called “Why Web Standards” on the horizon?
Honestly I had no idea. Wish I did – it sounds like a good one.
Posted on March 9, 2004 10:22 AM | #
17. Todd said:
Professionally, I didn’t have much trouble convincing my boss that our new website should be web standards compliant. It was also fairly easy to get him to agree to XHTML and CSS for the design of the site. “As long as it looks good!” was always his mantra.
The problem for me lay in the fact that I’m teaching all this to myself: through sites like this, Whitespace, Zeldman, ALA, Simple Bits, the usual suspects. I’m trying to adopt the web standards but sometimes I have to cheat because I just can’t figure out how to make things work in all browsers. Sometimes my CSS doesn’t work right.
I agree that knowledge of the importance of web standards and educating clients and designers alike is what has to happen. Since I’m still fairly new to web standards, I find myself learning something new (and enjoying the learning) everyday.
I’m going to keep at it though. This is where I see the web headed and I don’t want to be left behind.
Posted on March 9, 2004 10:41 AM | #
18. Mike P said:
I’m brewing up a post on a sub-paralel topic that’s eating my shorts these days, but for now what I see as the bottom line is this:
So, 1+2 means, as Derek said, “The public doesn’t know any better, so they pay the Dreamweaver operators to build them a site.”
And 3 means that soon enough they’ll be spitting out valid+semantic code and we’ll just be bitter ;-]
Posted on March 9, 2004 10:44 AM | #
19. Keith said:
Mike. On #3. Don’t hold your breath. I think it might be a bit longer than you might think and even if they do start to support standards, they may not do it very well.
Posted on March 9, 2004 10:59 AM | #
20. RMCox said:
A lot of what Derek (comment #1) points out is all too true and I don’t know that there will ever be a solution to that particular problem of the Dreamweaver “developer”. What I think can happen, for the client’s perspective, however, is the idea of web standards trickling down from corporate sites. Look at pga.com, sprint.com, etc. These are high profile sites taking advantage of these technologies that designers will look to when creating sites. The more corporate sites that are created with standards in mind, the more clients will desire the technology.
At first, I was hesitant to even consider standards-based design due to the fact that all the examples I found were, frankly, pretty unattractive. It wasn’t until the wired.com redesign (and judging by previous comments, I’m not alone in this) that I took the idea of a tableless layout seriously. Then wired.com led me to stopdesign.com and even more resources, but it still took a lot of practice and trial and error to get back to where I’d been with table-based design. At the beginning, I really didn’t know where to start so mostly I just experimented with code from other’s style guides: not the best way to learn, but it functioned. Eventually I found some awesome resources, so now I’m in the process, basically, of learning the how and why of what I’ve already done.
What really struck me, though, was the amount of good information tucked away on people’s personal pages. A lot of the resources are often too disparate so finding what you’re looking for leaves to pick through thousands of results from google and/or hundreds of links on people’s sidebars. You have to find one site then hope that it provides linkage to other resources and so on – maybe finding good information, but not specifically what you were looking for. In fact, the way I wound up at this site today was finding Stopdesign.com 5 or 6 months ago, regularly reading mezzoblue.com, and then clicking on this site from the mezzoblue sidebar. One of the things that I thought could help bridge that gap, was a centralized community-driven site that could provide linkage to all these resources, articles and information, so I created one. (A link to the alpha version is available on my homepage.)
The best thing, what this site seems to do very well, is to keep talking about these issues, the technology, the benefits, etc. Providing good examples of how to recreate certain effects is also vital and that coupled with awareness will further progress the movement. Getting the word out will be slow, but as more and more are able to see and the real value of web-standards the more designers and developers will take advantage of it.
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:10 AM | #
21. Mark said:
I only picked up on web standards about 2 or 3 months ago, but I have applied myself to using it as often as possible, both on my personal site (which really doesn’t need it due to the small audience) and my client’s sites.
I’ve gotten my boss hooked on the ideas of standards and accessibility, fortunately. Since lots of the work I do is in the medical sector (small independent practices and testing companies, etc), he’s been stressing the use of standards to all of our new clients.
In the medical field, you have an audience that will benefit greatly from strident usage of accessibility features. They don’t know anything about it to begin with, but by the time I’m done they’re very excited at the new possibilities.
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:20 AM | #
22. Tim Scarfe said:
I’m really interested in how all of you (web developers?) are so enthusiastic about web standards. What made you want to set the world to rights? What do you care if you get the pay cheque?
If one of your clients paid you to do a job and it took you 3 times longer to make it accessible and in the spirit of standards, would you? I mean obviously you wouldn’t waste your time trying to explain why this way is better because your client probably won’t care (and you shouldn’t bore them). It comes down to time and money.
I think it’s great that people like Zeldman have really gotten the message across but what I see now is gratuitous support of standards without regard to quality, features, cost, deadline and other factors. Standards have blinded most people to the extent that they are no longer capable of getting a “helicopter” view. I can imaging the stereotype some of us must portray to a business user. The kind of stereotype that would get us ignored pretty quickly.
I’m only presenting one position and there are many factors involved, such as your audience. There is no black and white and I get the impression reading this that some of you think there is. Just keep it in perspective anyway guys.
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:21 AM | #
23. Ste said:
If it were my choice alone, every site I develop would fully support web standards. Unfortunately, as you always say (and I’m paraphrasing), the Web is built on compromise.
I work in the educational field, where there is little to no interest (or funds) in keeping up with the “latest trends.” In an informal survey of the users of our website, I found that nearly 10% were still using Netscape 4.x and roughly 20% were using IE 5 or older on Windows. When you’re trying to develop a site that’s attractive and usable across that broad a spectrum, web standards is a bit harder to justify. That said, I’ve talked this issue over with my boss quite a bit, and she favors adhering to web standards in the next version of our site (woohoo!) precisely because of the benefits (improved semantics, accessibility, and file sizes).
I think the major barrier to common usage of web standards is still education. Apart from the small community of webloggers and dedicated professionals on listservs like WebDesign-L, very few people in the field realize the importance of standards. There are a few major stories about web standards (Wired.com springs to mind), but unless developers have taken the time to seek out more information, it’s too easily lost in the mass of other voices. (Learn ASP! Learn Flash! Usability! Accessibility! etc.) I know, for example, that my old university didn’t really teach web standards; indeed, the subject of actual HTML was hardly breached in my major at all (Interactive Multimedia Design). Dreamweaver was the lesson of choice, unfortunately, and few of the students bothered to teach themselves extracurricularly.
Which brings me to software - there’s just not enough support for web standards built into software like Dreamweaver and Frontpage. And, to me, there’s no easy way for companies to do so - especially when it comes to semantics. In order to write semantically correct code, it’s still easiest to simply hand-code it. For many of the college-educated web designers out there, hand-coding is a terrifying and/or Luddite thought. (I once met with a ‘technology expert’ who declared I must be the last person on Earth to hand-code my websites when I admitted as much to her. It was embarrassing, but not for me.)
Goodness, I should just start posting to my own website instead of commenting on yours! ;)
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:32 AM | #
24. Keith said:
Tim, your just the kind of person I wanted to hear from. I totally feel what you are saying.
I’ve actually written about those concerns quite a few times. There are many, many times when going with a Web standard approach isn’t really practical. It does come down to time and money. I personally like to think as far ahead as I can.
Let me give you a practical example of why I wish everyone would go with Web standards and one of the reasons why I “want to set the world to rights.”
I do quite a bit of work with legacy code. Pages that were “designed” with no thought to Web standards, usability, maintainability, etc.
The sites/pages are a pain in the ass to work with. Mainly because the code is non-standard, but there are other reasons.
If, for example, these pages had been coded with Web standards I’d have a much easier time of it when it comes to making changes, or updating for usability or any of countless other reasons why I’d want to work with them.
I spend lots of time stripping useless tags from content. A xhtml + css based design, if done right, could eliminate this.
Web standards doesn’t always equal easy to work with, but in general if you’ve got clean standard markup to begin with anyone who has to touch your code in the future will have a much easier time of working with it.
That is just one example, but your concern is valid and makes sense depending on where you stand and what your responsibilities on a project are.
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:42 AM | #
25. Jennifer Grucza said:
Personally, it doesn’t matter too much to me if my pages pass every test %100. That would be nice, but not necessary. It’s the concepts that really matter: accessibility, usability, and separation of presentation from content.
It’s the separation of content and presentation which I think gives the most practical benefit. It may take a longer in the short run, but the benefits in the long run make it worth it. Have a 1000 page site and need to adjust some bit of presentation on every single page? If you’ve done it in CSS, it’s orders of magnitude easier and faster.
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:50 AM | #
26. Vlad Alexander said:
Tim, once you get the hang of it, building to Web standards won’t take longer than slapping code together. On our Web site, a non-technical person updates content and still every page will validate to XHTML 1.1.
Another large reason for adopting Web standards is your future as a professional. There’s a direct relationship between Web standards and your marketability as a professional. If 2 candidates are interviewed and one can talk about Web standards while the other is still stuck in 1995, which one would you hire? And which one could claim the biggest salary?
These facts are so clear yet part of the reason standards are slow to be adopted is the college system itself. Most Web related courses teach students HTML 4. We see this all the time when we interview graduates and none of them know what CSS are. You can’t blame the students though if teachers themselves are ignorant - something we also know for a fact from contacting schools we’ve offered free XHTML tools to. Guess what? Most of the instructors themselves know next to nothing about XHTML.
Posted on March 9, 2004 12:08 PM | #
27. Keith Rose said:
Another thing to take into account is browser compliance. When the most used browser on the planet is not web standards compliant it causes a whole new set of issues. Browsers in an effort to maintain credibility will usually work to be web standards compliant, but they also like to create proprietary features that set them apart. The beloved hover tag was originally an IE proprietary tag. So even with Web standards compliant code you are still forced to use hacks. (i.e. the box model hack, etc.)
Posted on March 9, 2004 12:19 PM | #
28. Kevin Davis said:
I really like the point Jennifer had to make (#25). I don’t believe that 100% adherance to the standards is necessary at all. In larger projects I tend not to focus heavily upon validation, but, rather, whether a page will be usable for anyone using assistive devices (and I suppose we all need assistive devices, otherwise we could just run a firewire cable between the machine and our brains).
We needn’t be so hard on ourselves as designers to meet every specification. However, a change in thinking will make for a world of difference. Many designers currently see a web site as a single entity rather than a series of layers.
Interfacing is always a large challenge. Designers love flash because it liberates them of having to translate their vision into a more ambiguous format - code.
It is nice to be able to oversee the entire design process yourself - only recieving outside help if you request it.
In spite of all this, I really like the idea of being able to better distribute information about CSS design. There is a new expertise developing in web design, and any method of distribute this expertise will be warmly welcomed by designers.
I personally don’t expect to see an end to older coding methods or all-flash sites. There is no need, in my opinion, to worry about such things. If people are given an outlet with which they can explore, little will stand in their way.
However, I believe it is a matter of time when designers with a background in CSS will get the recognition they deserve. CSS will be well accepted (especially when we can embed typefaces), but it will never dominate as the “one true way.” In the end, I believe this is healthy for the medium.
Keith, thank you for your comments on my work! I suppose you have a good point. In some ways, the challenge is a sign that I haven’t fallen back to a tried and true technique (yet, anyway) but the process does become easier with time. Well, at least, one develops an understanding of why something doesn’t work.
Posted on March 9, 2004 01:09 PM | #
29. Michael said:
I’ll have to agree with what Keith Rose said @27 and add that, as a rank amateur, browser compliance is the single most aggravating thing that I deal with when coding. It can be frustrating to have code you think will position something in a certain part of the screen, only to see a browser decide that it should be placed in seemingly unrelated spot.
As for my stance on web standards, I try to stick to them at all costs, even at the cost of some design. I’m sure the professionals in the audience might be taken aback by this, but as I figure I’m still learning “the game” and am thus really only designing for myself, I can do this without much worry.
Posted on March 9, 2004 01:24 PM | #
30. supercrisis said:
I’m very keen on adopting web standards, but I’m having a hard time convincing my colleagues. We are a small company (less than 10 people) and the brass believes that 95% + of the Internet is viewed with IE5 and it will save us time and money to code for that and then charge extra for more browsers or standards support. This seems utterly wrong for me, but I can’t argue with the economics of it… but it’s hard to stand by a product that you don’t even believe in. I think I’ll stick to programming until IE Longhorn comes out and hopefully has standards. Then maybe he’ll be convinced.
Posted on March 9, 2004 03:49 PM | #
31. Marcus said:
I’d like to start using them, but right now the learning curve has just been too high for the amount of time I have to dedicate to learning it.
Slowly, and mainly in personal sites, I’ve applied more and more CSS standards compliant HTML or XHTML. I figure at the rate I’m going, by the time either MS IE starts supporting them or most people use standards compliant browsers, I’ll be up to speed.
Posted on March 9, 2004 05:01 PM | #
32. mattymcg said:
Don’t know if any of you have seen the Australian InFront site, it is a fantastic design portal a bit like K10K but purely Aussie. Anyway I started a thread on the forum to raise the case for web standards. Seeing as InFront is well regarded in the Australian design community, and many designers turn to it for their news and inspiration, I figured it would make sense if it was built with web standards, because it is so influential.
They weren’t interested. I think they feel that the design would be sacrificed, and that the pay-off simply wouldn’t justify the effort.
I tried!
Posted on March 9, 2004 05:40 PM | #
33. a partially blind said:
I’m not a hard coder like you guys, but my top most concern on web standards are the web-safe colors. I mean, if you’re a flash programmer, these codes are not much of a big issue but the use of colors. Now that everyone is using at least 24bit of color quality, is there still a web safe color palette?
Posted on March 9, 2004 09:33 PM | #
34. Lukasz said:
The main reason for not keeping standars is that most common browser does not support them. According to statistics standard compliant browser are used by a narrow margin of users. Why should one care, then?
IE comes with a number of plugins (FP extensions, other things). IE is so widespread one does not have to bother about things that actually don’t work in IE (opacity? mezzoblue.com menus? can’t recall atm). Note, web is business and since >90% customers use IE, managers cannot rely exclusively on standard supporting mozilla, firefoxes and other operas. Why should they, anyway?
Webstandards are nice and XHTML 1.0 strict webpage indicates an adroit designer and coder. Does it imply anything else?
(this all is in a nutshell, topic itself is so wide that one can write a book on this, not a short reply on public forum)
Posted on March 9, 2004 11:44 PM | #
35. Rimantas said:
Lukasz, let’s put it this way: why develop for one browser if you can for all? IE does not have antything built-in what would prevent it from rendering standart compliant web sites.
You can have advantage in modern browsers (market share of those will increase, I hope) without much sacrifice for IE users.
Build to standarts not for particular browser - that’s the idea behind standarts. Then you can expect your site
behaving OK in the future browsers, not only in one dominant today.
And building to standards is a lot easier than it seems.
Posted on March 10, 2004 03:00 AM | #
36. J.D. said:
I am also in a transition phase. I would love to code strictly to web standards. Unfortunately I work for a government agency that requires we support older browsers even though people can easily upgrade. It’s tough to not use tables for layout when you’re trying to make something look right in older versions of IE or Netscape. Atleast they finally dropped the requirement to suport Netsape 4.7.
Posted on March 10, 2004 04:51 AM | #
37. Lukasz said:
Rimantas, few remarks:
Let’s face the facts - it is omnipotent Microsoft that dictates the conditions; unless something happens, all we can do is pretending that our efforts would result in something prevailing.
Posted on March 10, 2004 05:39 AM | #
38. Rimantas said:
1. Site can be browsable with any decent browser. Does it _look_ the same - that is another question. Should it?
2. If you are used to code for IE - maybe. For me it was never a problem to get site look and work the same in NN4.x, Opera5 and IE4 few years ago, so I have much less problems nowdays. I have learnt my HTML back in golden days of Netscape3.x, and I was lucky enough to read specifications. I did a lot of coning during browser war so I avoided being trapped in browser specific coding. For me it is easier to code according specification and then tweak the code to avoid known problems with specific browsers than code for deviations of one browser and then try to double tweak it to get working in others. It is just a question of habits.
3. Does it really matter that much? Microsoft is a member of W3C and don’t forget – few years ago IE5 was (IMHO) the best browser and had best CSS support at some point. Wasn’t it IE first to pass 99% of CSS1 test suite?
Problem with IE is that it does not evolve any more. What was good back in 2000 is not enough today. It’s stopped for unknown period of time. Should that make us to stop too? I think no. IE is still capable of rendering HTML4.01 strict, I see no problem there. Making your code valid does not break anything, but it may fix many things.
Use advanced features for browsers which support them and leave fof IE that it can handle.
And don’t just wait “unless something happens” – let’s make that happen.
It is really exciting to see what will happen. Sure IE has huge market share now. But three years later current IE engine will be ~7 years old. Will people still use 7 years old software even if it is bundled with OS?
And competitors are very very strong, they only need some more marketing.
Posted on March 10, 2004 06:46 AM | #
39. Joshua Porter said:
Great discussion, Keith.
In #24 you brought up the constraints of time and money. It reminded me of an article I was lucky enough to write covering Molly Holzschlag and Eric Meyer where they talk about standards and “time and money”. However, time and money in this case were the reasons TO switch to standards.
The article is called Migrating to Web Standards. We grappled with many of the issues that you have brought up here.
Posted on March 10, 2004 06:57 AM | #
40. Cody Lindley said:
I can hear the sighs now. But I can’t help ask if some of the people posting here really believe that Dreamweaver is the culprit in badly coded web pages (non-standard). Or if the person who uses such a tool is to blame.
To the uneducated web developer reading these comments it would appear as if Dreamweaver had some role in the mass amount of web developers who developed non-standard web pages. This is in fact a fallacy! But many of you have alluded to this fact.
In the hands of a knowledgeable developer Dreamweaver is actually better at creating standard web pages, then creating non-standard pages. For example check out some of the articles & books written by Drew Mclellan.
http://www.allinthehead.com/
Sorry for the rant! But I would hate to see a stupid tool used by humans cloud the real issue.
That issue being the person using the tool, and not the tool.
Posted on March 10, 2004 08:32 AM | #
41. Keith said:
Josh – As you say there are many time and money reasons to go to Web standards. I think it’s much better to have that option (the knowhow to do it) than to not. In most cases you’ll save time and money for sure, especially in the long run.
As with most things Web – it depends on the project, but as a developer becomes more aquanted with Web standards and begins to lose their old coding habits, it gets easier and makes more sense to go the Web standard route.
Cody – Very good point. Somewhere up above it was mentioned that having better tools would make learning Web standards now a waste of time as they would generate the code for you. Like you say, with Dreamweaver, you sill need to understand how it all works behind the code.
And, anyway, what professional Web developer worth his or her salt, relies solely on a tool to generate their code?
Posted on March 10, 2004 08:48 AM | #
42. Andrew said:
I’m working with several developers using XSLT, which means that my HTML *has* to validate as XML, so it was a no-brainer to push that a bit and ask that we validate to XHTML DTDs. We’re doing several web apps with all-CSS layout, and my developers love it: they only have to write minimal HTML tags, and it’s easy for any one of us to read each other’s code.
Plus, our apps need to accomodate extensive rebranding by our services consultants, and so putting all of our visual style information into style sheets has let me create the apps’ basic look as black-and-white, no background images, plain kind of “wireframes”, but to put *all* of our company’s visual brand into a single additional sylesheet. It’s essentially a “difference” file: include it to get colors and logos, take it out to start from a plain vanilla look.
Doing it this way translates directly into quicker customer deployments, on the order of days of time, and so it was an easy sell.
Posted on March 10, 2004 10:07 AM | #
43. Ian Gordon said:
I am a freshman college student, I have been working on the web for nearly 6 years. I have been trying to make every effort to adopt to at least XHTML standards and CSS Standards, but it is hard. Much of the corrections require serious investments of time when I might not have much of it.
I do understand the need and reason for standards but, sometimes it is very arduous to constantly check against the referrer and then go back and make the changes just to make sure it is 100% XHTML compliant. I strive to better myself however.
Posted on March 10, 2004 11:39 AM | #
44. Ian Stewart said:
I’m new to this web development/design business (but with plenty of experience in the traditional IT field), and I’m still struggling with the CSS vs. rendering issues in the Redmond WMD (Weapon of Mass Dysfunction).
I think of it as the “5 Stages of (CSS) Grief” … and just when it seems like things are working, it bites me again. (Simply adding an indented paragraph can ruin your whole day! But you can fix it - sometimes - by adding a gratuitous border somewhere else … grrrrr!?)
The situation is much easier with respect to the HTML though. Like Andrew, I’ve found that XSLT can be used to produce valid pages. I’ve been building my Java/XML/XSLT based production system (for static sites) since Christmas, and it’s “nearly” ready to go. (It’s been suffering from feature creep, but I’m pleased with the result!)
I started this exercise after hand-coding a few pages of my own site, and decided that hand-coding repetitive constructs, especially menus and the like was a tedious waste of time. I was wondering how easy it would be to go through all the pages if I added another top-level section, adding the link to the menu on each page … OK, it could be done, but should it be done by hand?
Last week I got to the stage where my generated site was actually functional (now I need to write some real content for it!) It occurred to me to check the validity of the generated site at this point, and both the W3 and the WDG validators gave it a clean bill of health first time with no special effort on my part! (I’m generating HTML 4.01 Strict, not XHTML at this stage - I can change it to XHTML 1.0 Strict by simply changing the XLST template output specification and regenerating the site, but I’m presuming little control of the server environment, and expecting it’ll get served as text/html, so why not make it that?) I could still no doubt generate an invalid page, but it would be more a conceptual error in the template structure, not a silly typo.
My position on the CSS is more cynical at this point. It’s hard to get motivated to learn things like advanced selectors, for instance, only to find that most of them don’t work in IE. I’m sure that if I could simply write the CSS to the so-called standard, I could cut the size and complexity of my CSS down to about a third of what it is today. Perhaps there’s scope to improve on it even so, but … as I said, not much motivation.
As I’m just learning web technology now, it seems to make sense (in spite of the current situation) to persevere with the CSS. But I can relate to why others may not want to make a transition to it at this stage, if what they’re doing works (for them, at least).
But I’m trying to keep my options open. By introducing another layer into the separation of presentation and content, I’m not bound by any particular output medium. This means I should be able to adapt to evolving standards, or even go backwards for pragmatic reasons without being locked into that situation long term, or compromising the overall benefits derived from my production system. So, if a client had a (possibly perceived) need to support NN4, I could still render the site with tables by changing just the XSLT template(s), and the CSS (if any remained). Later, a replacement XSLT template and some CSS would be all that should be required to bring it in line with the current standards. Or alternate versions could be rendered if appropriate (e.g. it could produce an abbreviated format targeted at mobile devices, and a normal one for everybody else …)
So, I’m not inclined to get too evangelical about the standards - I’m basically taking steps to isolate what I’m doing from too much dependence on them (or lack of them).
BTW, Keith: I’m still here! No site yet - as I mentioned above, I’ve been preoccupied by the technology for building sites in general, which I’m hoping will pay off in the longer term. I’m intending to publish a basic site in the next two to three weeks, now that my production system is basically functional … I’ll let you know when.
Posted on March 10, 2004 02:37 PM | #
45. benjee said:
The awkward teenage of web standards is both necessary and useful. This is the time when web designers / coders / philosophers need to work through the difficulties and the strains of a developing technology, and we will surely all look back with an embarrassed nostalgia at the time when we were all getting to know the standards.
I follow the development of standards compliant design, and I like what I see. But I also accept that it is not appropriate for every designer or project. I believe that it will become so, but for now I think awareness is the key issue.
I code web pages. I work closely with a graphic designer who shudders at the thought of html, never mind xhtml or css. He does not let me get caught up in a wave of standards-compliant euphoria, and I stop him from creating semantically meaningless graphic-based sites.
The key for me is not to try to design sites based on your knowledge of web standards. Keep them in mind as you codify the original creative vision for the site. More often than not I end up with validating code. Do my clients know this? No.
Those of us that appreciate the satisfying structure of a well-designed site will continue to supply code that is coherently designed using the most appropriate technology, if only to be able to sleep well at night, safe in the knowledge that our code *makes sense*.
Standards may eventually become the accepted method of web design but for now, until the w3c teenager grows up, let’s just see the standards as an interesting, but as yet immature friend.
Posted on March 10, 2004 06:39 PM | #
46. LaQuisha said:
This reason I use tables for website layout - and not the more desirable divs and associated is CSS, is the time it takes (and thus the cost to the client) to make sure that trickydicky CSS is working accross a variety of platforms.
For better or for worse, for layouts tables are boringly reliable.
Posted on March 10, 2004 07:10 PM | #
47. Grant said:
This is certainly an interesting discussion. I work in one of many IT groups for a large company and I’ve been following the world of web standards for over a year now, but haven’t begun practicing it until recently in my personal site I recently started.
In my day-to-day work I do not use stadards based designs for the internal web applications we develop. We’re still stuck designing applications using nested tables and tranparent spacer gifs. I cannot create designs using XHTML & CSS because I’d be the sole person who would know how to maintain that code. All our developers only know basic CSS to style fonts. So, if I moved groups or left the company completely, then they’d be stuck in the design and/or couldn’t make basic changes. Also, it’s tough to sell people on the fact that the pages will not appear exactly the same in all browsers, especially browsers where the markup will be unstyled. It’s a little easier now days since we finally stated that we’ll only support IE6 and Mozilla based browsers internally. However the reality is that people still use non-standards compliant browsers. What is a big help that may allow me to bring up web standards again is that our intranet has just been re-designed with a transitional layout using XHTML & CSS. If our intranet can use some web standards, then why can’t our internal applications?
Posted on March 11, 2004 01:50 AM | #
48. Abed Islam said:
I used to intern at an ISP gone Web Development.. Though I was on the design team, all I ever did was work with templates (cross-browser, cross-platform compatible table-based layouts which included the dreaded NS4.x). This was about 4-5 years ago.
Now I work for my university’s webteam doing essentially the same things - hideous grunt work. What makes the grunt work hideous (asides from it being grunt work) is that the hand-coded html looks worse than stuff I’ve seen from the combined efforts of MS Word, FrontPage, and Mac. Fireworks. I’ve spoken to some individuals about this and it seems that noone really cares. Hell, not a single individual seemed to understand why it was nice having standalone versions of IE on one computer. People wondered why I had so many different browsers on a single PC… ::angst::
Moving on along~
I’ve proposed many times to restructure pages to at least have them cleaned out, but it’s not an option for one simple reason: we don’t get paid for that. To take the time to change a page, I’d have to get permission from the Webmaster who’d have to get permission from the corresponding department who’d have to check if their budget could give them the go. It’s a process they try to avoid as much as possible.
A few months ago I was growing weary of the homepage and took the initiative to have it restructured (I should have opted to redesign it seeing how it looks like, to quote my Multimedia ‘professor’, “cat puke”) in support of standards. The site had to support Netscape 4.. yet I could ignore IE4.. as well as Macs.. (::bashes head against wall::). I went the extra mile to have it be cross-browser, cross-platform compatible sans IE4.
Now, I’ve never actually made a site with semantic markup and what not, but after pretty much completing this task I’ve come to the conclusion that a liquid non-table layout (width, font size, positioning, etc.) for sites that have to support NS4 is just not feasible.
I was fortunate that just about everything on my university’s homepage was absolutely positioned to begin with.
So in terms of projects done under my uni’s webteam, many people will lose their hair before standards are supported. Projects of my own (which I’ve no time for) I’ll feel free to support standards to my liking (<3 Tantek’s high-pass filter).
I don’t want to seem like I’m spamming so if you care to see either: 1. my uni’s homepage (serves as a good laugh for [web] designers everywhere) and/or 2. the work that I did (which I doubt will be used any time in the near future) just toss me an e-mail.
Posted on March 11, 2004 11:15 PM | #
49. Morgan said:
I think the question, for many, has gone beyond just ‘why standards’ as many people take great pains in meeting standards, I think the question of the day is ‘how can we contribute more to standards development?’
Posted on March 14, 2004 11:06 PM | #
50. Jaime said:
I guess my comments are pretty much the same as some of the above.
I got to know about the power of CSS from the Dreamweaver forum actually when I was facing some problem with Dreamweaver MX 2004 because it uses correct XHTML 1.0 DTD and I could not longer use my favourite 100%-height hack ;) From there, I started doing some research on CSS and that leads me to web standards and pretty much like some here..I got hooked to it!
It was a nightmare changing from table to css layout but once I got through it, things fall into place and I have better understanding but there are still many obstacles which I have yet to overcome…mainly with browsers compatibility.
Adopting to web standards are tough and one needs persistency and determination as well as interest in it.
The problem I am facing here is that no one I know in this industry knows about web standards (where I am at). Even if they do, they do not care for it. The Government Websites here are not standards compliant and non of my projects requires the site to be standards compliant with the exception of one which shocked the hell out of me because it is RARE!
Flash seems to be the trend here now. People go for the design of the website and they do not care if it is non-accessible to some.
After banging my head against the wall everytime for trying to introduce standards and working with css to fellow web designer friends and companies who assign projects to me, I can’t help but feel that I might be an alien among all these “normal” people.
Posted on March 15, 2004 12:28 PM | #
51. Alex Braun said:
Why not web standards? Well, why is your own page not valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional as declared in the header?
Disappointing…
Posted on March 16, 2004 05:50 AM | #
52. Houser said:
Silly Rabbit, Alex Braun, it’s not validating because some peeps posted non-compliant comments. Everything up until the user comments validates.
Don’t fake the funk.
Posted on March 16, 2004 01:02 PM | #
53. Thierry Danard said:
Technical choices must be based upon the constraints you have: users, hardware, software, requirements, resources, money, time, etc.
Even a static web site is an application and must follow some basic rules of software development.
Wondering which web “standards” should be followed is like asking which programming language is best: Lisp, Fortran, C, C++, Visual Basic, Perl, Java, etc. Best for what ? For whom ?
Now, about XHTML: remember when it was so cool to use frames ? And what about Java applets ? And DHTML ? Active X ? I spent a great deal of time trying to explain why all these novelties were not a good choice for the applications I was designing. And you know what, nobody believed me, but that doesn’t keep me from trying again:
XHTML is still in the fad phase. It’s great web designers can make some bucks with it: “redesign your web site, HTML days are over”. Furthermore, with XHTML 2 being released, there won’t be many people understanding why XHTML 1 should still be used, even though XHTML 1 and XHTML 2 were not made available for the same purpose. It’s rather sad to say that this marketing mistake might very well be a deadly blow for XHTML as a whole.
I think that there is a point where user interfaces must be customized for each type of device. Luring customers into thinking that people will be able to (and want to) browse your web site with their cell phone because you have used XHTML is like saying that your design of Boeing cockpit is so generic, it can be applied to the dashboard of all cars.
Posted on March 18, 2004 10:48 PM | #
54. dan said:
i don’t see why.
It’s not that i dislike standards in general. The problem is: nobody knows if the standards will ever really be standards. Everybody hopes that the next explorer will display CSS just like Firefox. But as we know Microsoft something totally unexpected might happen and all entirely CSS-based sites might look totally crappy. Todays browsers already have very different interpretations of CSS, though even internet explorer was built with the standards in mind. They just “interpreted” certain things a little differently - or maybe they have just worked a little sloppy. But whatever it is: the fact remains that you can only hope but never be sure wether or not standards will lead to forward-compatible webdesign. Backwards-compatibility of browsers seems more likely unless Microsoft wants to loose many users because suddenly the new explorer doesn’t show most sites properly anymore.
I like CSS, but i don’t see the benefit of XHTML yet, nor the reason why i should only use tables for tabular data, not for layout. I don’t want to belong to those pitiable people trying to find a hack for everything that used to be so easy before they made it hard for themselves.
Also, WYSIWYG-tools are not very good with CSS yet. When it gets a little complex it’s not really WYSIWYG at all anymore. So: back to hand-coding? Although i’m good with HTML that doesn’t really sound inviting.
Posted on May 3, 2005 12:58 PM | #
55. Dan said:
Because some of us don’t just use CSS to customize our prebuilt blog-scripts. A shame how every newbie jumps on moveabletype and co, adds some CSS and then claims “look, i’m an xhtml pro”.
Funny how every web standards aficionado has a weblog rather than a proper portfolio site.
Posted on May 4, 2005 02:41 AM | #
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