Web Standards Blindness
April 22, 2005 | 
43 Comments
It’s been quite awhile since I’ve talked about Web standards. I think part of the reason is because most of the people who read this site already know most of what I’d have to say. As some of you may know, I’ve been trying to get my writings out to a wider audience. A while back I published a SEO piece targeted towards marketers and I’ve also written a few Web standards and best practices articles geared towards decision-makers.
You can only take a message so far by preaching to the choir!
Which brings me to the point of this post. There are some thriving Web professional communities online. If you are reading this chances are you belong to one of them. You read blogs, you practice life-long learning, have a passion for the Web and do your best to keep up with the jones’.
However, my guess is that when it comes to Web professionals, you’re part of a minority.
There is a larger community out there
Sometimes our online community seems very large, almost unmanageably so. And that’d make sense, I mean you’d think that Web professionals would be a natural fit for online professional communities right? Sure. However, I think there are many more Web professionals out there who don’t belong to an online community of fellow Web professionals.
Being a Web designer, developer, or what-have-you is a job. It’s work. Some people don’t like to take their work home with them. Some people like to come in to a full inbox and go home with an empty inbox. Some people are perfectly happy doing their job as they’ve always done it.
To those people change can be a threat. Benefits can be perceived as liabilities. Lifelong learning can be seen as nothing more than more work.
Who am I to tell them that’s wrong?
Spreading the word beyond the Web
I know quite a few very good people who fit the mold I’m talking about. In fact, here in Seattle anyway, that is much more the norm for the Web professionals I know. They’re blind to Web standards, they don’t know who Zeldman is. They don’t read blogs, they don’t belong to list-servs and they don’t much care about any of that.
How do we help them help themselves? It’s a tough question. I mean, who am I (as a Web standards advocate) to tell someone who’s been coding sites the same way for almost as long as I have that he’s doing it wrong? How do I even broach the subject?
I wish I had an answer for you, I really do, but at this point I’m at a loss. Part of me thinks we’ve done all we can do to extol the values of Web standards to Web professionals and that those who will get it already do. But then I think about how Web standards have made my life, and my work, so much easier in so many ways and I feel a certain responsibility to spread the word. So what can be done?
I do have one idea.
Start with decision-makers
If we can get the eyes and ears (and wallets and purses) of those who pay Web professionals and convince them of the value, then we’ve created a forum where people find it in their best interest to listen. I think there is still a ways to go to promote Web standards (and other best practices) and I think by trying to get (via conferences, publications, etc.) the message out to people who might respect the bottom line might just be the best way to help spread the word.
What do you think? Got any ideas?
Filed under: Web Standards
Keyword Tags: standards lifelong+learning web+best+practice
Comments
1. Mark Priestap said:
As one who was a recent convert, I’ll just share how / why I was converted.
As part of my full-time job I was sent to Web Design World in Boston last December ‘04. I came there thinking I knew a lot, but was looking forward to learning a little more.
I had heard of table-less design before, but had tried it and found it to be very difficult with very little benefit. It made my job twice as hard and took 3 times longer. I gave up quickly. One of the biggest obstacles was understanding how floats work.
After hearing Zeldman, Bowman and Molly H. evangelize us on the benefits of said approach and watching it DEMONSTRATED I started to realize just how important table-less design can be. It also revealed that it was not that difficult to acheive.
Bowman’s redesign of Microsoft’s homepage is exhibit A on how powerful it can be. I used this example at my full-time job and converted lots of non-designers. Demonstration is key. Otherwise it sounds like just another approach that will probably go away instead of a valuable, marketable tool in one’s toolbelt.
I recommend reading Zeldman’s talking points at ALA…I don’t have the URL in front of me, but it’s an easy thing to google for.
Also important is feeling part of an “up-and-coming” sort of community. Selling people on this is another interest catcher. Don’t name drop though…that’s tedious and political. It’s just good for one’s career to know people.
All that added up to a big wake-up call for me.
Posted on April 22, 2005 11:55 AM | #
2. Yannick L. said:
Keith, wow it seems some of you topics of late are the same things I have been wondering about. I currently work part time at my university in the web development department and though we have switched to using XHTML many of the persons making websites have not adopted web standards. A few have seen some of the things I have done using CSS (though simple as they are) and are in awe at what CSS can do but are still reluctant to try to learn it and use it regularly themselves.
I have been wondering, how am I going to let these people to learn webstandards?
Apart of me is afraid to, as I am one of the new members to the team and also the youngest. Another part of me wants to just speak out and tell em about it and the benefits. I guess as you pointed out one way is to speak with the decision makers. And I agree also that conferences and publications can help as well. There are absolutely no conferences about web design where I am from (Jamaica). *LIGHT BULB* Perhaps one day I should actually try and do that. hehe.
Some other ideas that actually just popped into my head are:
How does that sound?
Posted on April 22, 2005 12:01 PM | #
3. Chris K said:
I think the key is effectively communicating the benefits of web standards to decision makers. That’s helped me in converting the teams I work on and with, and in gaining new web design business from clients. Most of my clients are small businesses and hiring someone that learned web design via Frontpage. I think what will take full time web designers to investigate and adopt standards is when they begin losing work to standards-sensitive designers.
Posted on April 22, 2005 12:03 PM | #
4. Jeremy Flint said:
I think another way to get the word out is to reach out to educators. There are still students coming out of school that think Dreamweaver does everything they need to, have no idea how to write their own HTML, much less CSS, and seem to be quite content with that.
If the people teaching web design would teach from a perspective of Web Standards, then it would be easier to get it into the “mainstream”.
The problem is that most people who are teaching web design right now are re-purposed Graphic Design instructors who were handed a Dreamweaver book (or worse, Frontpage) and told to teach.
Posted on April 22, 2005 12:41 PM | #
5. Keith said:
Mark – You remind me of a great point. Those of use who can still need to get out to conferences and talk about standards, even if for many it’s old hat. At SXSW I was thinking, “mmm, why would anyone want to go to this CSS talk or that XHTML thing?” But then I remembered that there are plently of folks who go to SXSW and other conferences who might not have been exposed to it. That was one of the things that lead me to write this post and begin to try and talk to different audiences.
That ties into what Jeremy is talking about. Web design education is way behind and needs help. One thing we can do is maybe get more Web standards advocates into teaching roles…As well, we can try and get on the radar of those who are in those roles now. I know I’ve done a bit of that in the past.
Posted on April 22, 2005 12:50 PM | #
6. Yannick L. said:
Ahh good point Jeremy. So true. I have seen courses offered here for HTML and I am sure they aren’t teaching them Web Standards. It would be good to get them to start.
Posted on April 22, 2005 12:54 PM | #
7. Ken Kolano said:
Well many larger businesses have departments or individuals assigned to define standards around content publishing / development, though often these are more closely aligned to application development than content development. Wooing these folks, and convincing them to promote web standards design from within an organization can have signifigant impact.
When I started at my job in such an area, one of the first things I did was to publish a set of X/HTML + CSS guidelines that included using of “valid” code. Though initial movement towards this was slow, now 5 years later I’m happy to say that though there is still a long way to go (thank you crufty off the shelf apps) signifigant progress has been made. It’s easy to think of web standards activism as some sort of elitist activity, keep in mind we are slowly making headway.
Finally, regarding the folks who “are perfectly happy doing their job as they’ve always done it.” Nothing we’ll do will likely ever sway them. What’s required to fix the issues they cause is some significant improvement in web development toolsets. Come on Adobimedia (fingers crossed).
Posted on April 22, 2005 12:57 PM | #
8. Sharif said:
The key seems to be getting the benefits of standards in front of non-designers, outside of the client/designer context.
A couple years ago, when standards-based redesigns of major corporate sites were few and far between, I remember seeing occasional “About the redesign” pages, explaining what had been done (and, unfortunately, why the site might appear broken in older browsers). The redesigned ESPN site, as an example, had a very clear explanantion of the changes.
Perhaps by continuing this practice on high-exposure sites, observant “laypeople” may begin to ask for standards in their next project.
Ok, probably not. But they will have at least seen some of the terminology, making the designer’s explanation of benefits that much easier.
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:01 PM | #
9. Nic Johnson said:
Perhaps another arena that we should target is acadaemia. There are thousands of students graduating with bachelor, associate, and technical degrees each semester. So many of them are required to take at least a dash of web programming/design as a graduation requisite. (That’s how I was first exposed to web design).
If we can target the professors and department heads and get them shifting toward a standards approach, we’ve gone to the source and this can create a whole new up-and-coming generation of standards-oriented designers.
Besides, the academics are—for the most part&mdashsome of the most forward thinking people out there.
Instead of focusing purely on corporate seminars that cost so dang much, why don’t we offer our time and talents to do free lectures/seminars at universities and colleges?
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:05 PM | #
10. Jeremy Flint said:
The problem in education is that, at least at the University level, web design is seen as an extension of Graphic Design, when in reality it is more a combination of Graphic Design and Programming (to an extent).
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:09 PM | #
11. Mike Rainey said:
Educators in my neck of the woods (North Carolina) rarely, if ever, teach web standards. Even though I’ve been a web designer for years, I looked into taking a web design class just to get the paper (employers seem to like that). Of the community, trade, and 4-year colleges that even offered a course in web design, only one instructor knew what I was talking about when I said web standards. Several of the instructors in their curriculums still teach using FrontPage 98.
I decided not to take the classes and went to my local community college and asked if their was any room to teach web design courses using web standards. And, not to my surprise, you need an Associates or better to teach.
(And just to tell you, the local community college here has an instructor who has never heard of CSS. Bad.)
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:09 PM | #
12. Nick said:
I agree with Sharif, getting the decision makers or the people who pay the bills to understand the benefits of web standards is great, but unless you get the people building or designing the sites it’s not fully going to work.
I really think we need some sort of dumbed-down way of explaining to businesses, designers and developers the benefits of web standards.
A catchy slogan, a name that people will remember, similiar to what happened w/ ajax. Somebody finally came along to slapped a label on it and everybody and their grandmother hopped on the bandwagon, maybe that’s what we need to do with web standards? I mean is the term “web standards” too general or bland? I don’t know.
But I say, let’s market this thing we call web standards, get people on the bandwagon and then go from there. When people get excited about something they naturally want to dig deeper and eventually learn more about it.
Another note, just the other day I was trying to explain to a client the concept of web standards and I had a pretty tough time, it just seems to me like non-technical people just don’t care how you get the site done, just that you get it done. So you to convince or explain to them in a real world way that this is the way to go? I don’t know.
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:12 PM | #
13. ben said:
I wanted to write a brief note to say that the subject of your post has been a matter of extensive discussion within WaSP for several months - it’s only with the momentum gained from SXSW happenings that we’re starting to do more than just DISCUSS in this area, among many.
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:47 PM | #
14. Brian Paulson said:
I worked for sometime to get our local Community College to teach web standards in all their web based courses and it finally happened some time last year.
With clients the best thing we have figured out is to show examples and explain the cost savings (less bandwidth, easy changes to look of site) to using standards.
I have also been working on the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) to publish more on web standards cause lets fast it the newspaper industry is one of the worst when it comes to web standards.
I think the schools is where it needs to start though as that is where the people who are going to be future developers/business owners are coming from and if they learn it early it makes our job a lot easier.
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:48 PM | #
15. Kevin Tamura said:
Okay, there is something in the water here in Seattle; I just finished giving a presentation on web standards to the company I work for. Even though Brian (the other designer) and I have been building sites with web standards for over a year this was the first time for all of the devs and managers and owners of the company. It was well received and lead to some great questions and people saying I didn’t know you could do it like that. Whether it takes hold is another question, but there is much more understanding and interest from the top down. It also didn’t hurt showing the devs nice clean code, they love that.
My next challenge will be to take web standards to my new job, where I will be doing nothing but design. If I can get them to buy off on standards then we’ll have another big company to add to the list.
On the subject of schools: I thought it would be great if some of us up here were able to teach a web design class at SVC (or UW Experimental College) where we focus on UA, UX, Design and standards. Yet, this has never progressed from being an idea.
Posted on April 22, 2005 01:49 PM | #
16. Murray said:
Hi there, first time I’ve felt inclined to comment but I think there’s a part of the argument missing - we need better learners.
I only really started working with websites about nine months ago and whilst I have dabbled in some ‘client’ work for friends I’m not really in it proffessionally. However, I quickly realised that the book I started learning with would date very quickly in the web world and I started finding on-line resources and then found some blogs and found zeldman and a list apart etc. and now try and be as standards compliant as I can, and consider accessibility and use css 100% for layout and prettiness etc.
The point being though, that too many people out there seem easily satisfied with few sources of information, old information or just plain bad information. This isn’t just an issue in web-world but news and politics and art etc. The vast amounts of information we have availible to us now though can easily bury people and leave them more confused than when they started. What people need to be taught, starting at school, are real world skills in dealing with and using information effectively.
In the short-term, seeing as it would be wrong to exlude people because their learning skills weren’t up to standard (or the standard I’m suggesting if you disagree with me) because that completely goes against what teaching is about, so evangelising and discussing web standards in wider circles is probably the best method.
But long-term people really need to find the confidence and skills too keep questioning the validity of their sources, keep peeling of layers to find out what’s under the surface and retain that childish thrill of exploration.
okay, started getting a bit soppy right at the end but I hope you get my gist.
Posted on April 22, 2005 02:36 PM | #
17. Greg Burghardt said:
I have to agree with Jeremy Flint. We need to be educating students. In fact, I post regularly at Web Developer Forums and someone posted a poll about how old members were. A significant amount of the members – I’m not sure I would say majority, but very close – were high school and college-aged. Design practices of professionals aren’t going to change until a Changing of the Guard takes place in web dev and design.
The up-and-coming designers not yet in the work force are versed in standards and accessibility (or at least more so) than most of the current professionals. Design practices will change when the young-ins start getting jobs. They already have the knowledge. It seems current professionals don’t have the time to devote to retooling their design methods.
Posted on April 22, 2005 03:00 PM | #
18. Scott said:
Nothing much to contribute, but speaking of teaching people about standards, I want to thank you Keith. What seems like forever ago (some time in 2004 I think) I stumbled across your site, which was my first real point of contact with the community. Earlier today I delivered my senior thesis defense on the value of developing standards-based sites. Thanks for getting me started down the path, as time consuming as it can occasionally be. : )
Posted on April 22, 2005 03:34 PM | #
19. Ramin said:
I remember advocating web standards and tableless design back in 2001 when I was still in college. It was a great challenge to get administration and the other developers and designers to work w/o tables and write clean semantic and accessible xhtml. But you gotta keep pushing them. Show them examples. Explain the benefits. Eventually they’ll eithre give in or replace you with someone else who doesn’t nag as much =]
Now nearly 5 years later I am working at a pretty large company (1800flowers.com) and I’m amazed to see that not a single designer or developer writes clean xhtml or uses CSS properly. I’ve only been there for a few months and they already think I’m some sort of anomaly. I’ve managed to convince atleast one designer/developer to use CSS the way it was meant to be used. But I was only able to do this through examples.
You may visit blogs like this one and think that there are alot of us out there, but honestly, we are a VERY SMALL minority. But I do see that every year more and more are joining the ranks, so thats always a good thing (or is it? - job security! haha, I hate that word.)
So keep nagging your friends, co-workers, project leaders and anyone else who’s willing to listen (or not - just keep nagging anyway). If they really don’t get it, then they just don’t get it. Just be happy that YOU got it.
Posted on April 22, 2005 04:06 PM | #
20. Lea said:
I feel the hip pocket is a good way to do it.
Go through accessibility requirements.
If we can reach clients (somehow? :( ) and explain that they are missing market share because old-style development is generally inaccessible we can effectively start at the bottom.
What about pushing for a WSJ or NYT story on ‘The Missing Marketshare’? Any journos owe anyone a favour?
Posted on April 22, 2005 06:30 PM | #
21. Jonathan Snook said:
When it comes to dealing with clients, it’s not an issue. It never gets mentioned. It’s just how it’s done. Likewise, I’m not sure I’ve ever had to convince a “decision-maker” in any organization I’ve worked with in how I implement my solutions. If it works and I get the job done, why would they care?
It’s the other developers out there. How do we convince them? Purely by example. For me, it’s been the one-on-one demonstration of what I can pull off and how quickly. Seriously, if someone told you that you develop a site quicker and easier, wouldn’t you be interested to hear what they have to say?
Posted on April 22, 2005 09:30 PM | #
22. Georg said:
Just a few words about “wording”.
Before anyone explodes and use the word “troll” here: I’m part of the community that tries to solve real world problems by helping web designers into proper use of standards over at [css-d] and [WSG] and elsewhere. Besides; I’m Norwegian, and know what a real “troll” is: a nice, big, creature with a mind of its own…
I think I belong to the part of the standard-minority who see, and use, standards for what they are.
Being what looks like a minority within a minority doesn’t make it too easy to promote the use of standards anywhere. I even find it difficult to promote proper use of standards within the world of standard-based web-design, simply because the word “standard” gets in the way.
There are simply too many ways to use standards. Some ways are good, and some are definitely bad. I know perfectly well what web-standards are: a set of tools which provides some predictability. Being shot at by standard-advocates for not “standardizing” myself, is definitely not good use of “standards”.
1; Standards have nothing to do with quality. Standards are everywhere, so the word “standard” carry little or no weight in itself. Just try to “impress” Internet Explorer by using standards…
(Personally I get more standard behavior out of that thing in “quirks”, but the word “standard” gets in the way if I openly admit to using such a solution. Doesn’t matter that I make IE simulate standard behavior by doing so, I’m still accused of using the “wrong” word.)
2: Standards give us proper tools and measurements, so we don’t always ends up trying to fit round things into square holes. However, we will have to sort out which standards to use if we wanna get it right.
They even got it wrong on a mission to Mars simply because they mixed standards…
3: Standards can be used to put limits on what we are allowed to do. Few or none of these limits are logical, and they only delay progress. Ruling a community by standardizing everything is a well known method, that usually fails after a while because progress can’t be stopped forever by enforcing standards.
4: Standards often loose touch with reality, and becomes a safe haven for fools an mindless creatures so they don’t have to face reality. This doesn’t sound good, but escaping reality in a “standard” way is often the reality. Try to make some sense out of that one.
5: Standards are often used as a lowest common denominator on the web. That’s wrong: standards should be the used as a booster-rocket when we want to cover the web-space. We can get higher and cover more, when we use standards properly. This message doesn’t seem to get through – anywhere. I hope it will – some day.
Finally:
We have to push for standards, but we also have to push the standards beyond where they are at any given time. “Progress” is the name of the game – “standards” are just tools.
Posted on April 23, 2005 12:55 AM | #
23. Joshua Porter said:
Keith, I agree with all that you’re saying from a design standpoint, but I’m not sure how it fits from a business standpoint.
Look at the top ecommerce companies: Google, Amazon, eBay. Exemplary sites, and not one of these sites validate to standards. In fact, they don’t even have doctype declarations.
The value of standards is greatest for the designer, less so for the user, and much less so for the business as a whole. Simply put, if businesses are going to focus on one thing to make their site successful, it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) standards. It probably wouldn’t be the second thing, either…just where would they fit in?
Perhaps we should put standards in the proper place: they are the best tool available out there right now, and designers should consider them, but since they aren’t a requirement for success, it’s tough to make a case for them right now.
There is hope, though. For example, it’s relatively hard to succeed using an invalid RSS feed. Most feed readers don’t accept invalid feeds. So maybe the same thing will happen with XHTML: if browsers force validation we would probably see change come pretty quickly.
Posted on April 23, 2005 06:19 AM | #
24. BJ said:
A few of you have said that small business owners don’t care how the job is done, as long as it’s done. I’ve won two jobs out of two presentations lately by telling the decision maker how I’ll do it better- 1) in a way search engines like more and 2) in a way that other nontraditional devices can at least access the info (ie cellphones, screenreaders and PDAs)- both of which will give their site a broader audience. I also tell them I do it by writing code that is up to date now, instead of code that was up to date five years ago.
My point is that you don’t have to beat the “standards” drum to make your point. Nobody wants to buy something that is already out of date. All you have to do is show the better way.
An interesting fact is I was told after the fact that my bid was a bit higher in both cases. I guess my perceived value was correspondingly higher. It’s either that or I’m better at BS *grin*
Posted on April 23, 2005 03:58 PM | #
25. Kev said:
All web design professionals, whether or not they participate in communities, attend conferences or chat on Usenet or IRC do one thing - use search engines.
So, take a look at a simple Google for ‘web design tutorials’ and see what you get. Not pretty is it?
To that end I started Project: New earlier this year, a collection of tutorials for new web designers and web designers new to web design standards and whilst writing it I had a goal in mind in terms of getting the right people to read it. I made it as engine friendly as possible. I also made sure to comment on it on my blog - its early days yet but its in the top 100 on Google for a couple of relevant phrases and my inbound links are generating a PR of about 7 for the Project - the more people link to it the better ranking it will get and the more exposure to the key market it will recieve.
This isn’t a plea to get you to link me up but for us all to realise the benefits of search engine optimisation on the articles and sites we build on this subject. Search engines are universal so we should all be aiming our tutorials/examples/etc to do well in them - that way we reach many more people who aren’t interested in (or who don’t know about) the design community.
Posted on April 24, 2005 01:32 AM | #
26. Rea said:
Keith, you said exactly everything I’ve felt for a while now. And I also have to say that I agree 100% with what Jeremy said about education.
A few months ago I started a new job as a graphic design assistant, and honestly I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with what the company needed. Then after a few days I realized that I knew quite a bit more than my boss. She’s only 5 years my senior, but she uses many non-standards to create websites. I spent about two weeks “cleaning up” the current redesign of the company website, making the html somewhat readable and a bit less messy. I have tried so hard to make it standards compliant, and it still doesn’t even come close to validating. The site is bogged down with tables upon tables, tons of java-script, and so much “stuff” that it’ll be a long time before it comes close to what it should be.
I am very much afraid of saying anything, as I have just been working here for a short while and am relatively inexperienced compared to her. I want to show her and everyone else how much better the site could be, but I am not sure how to approach it at all. The CEO has no idea what css is, all he wants is a “catchy, flashy site.”
What’s even more interesting is the fact that she graduated from the college that I am recently attending, and that’s where she learned what she knows. The company wants breadcrumbs on the site to help people navigate easier and when I went to add the styling in the style sheet, she asked me what I was doing. Erm….
I wish my university offered classes dealing with web standards, heck, I wish my university offered web development as a degree. The closes for us is, you guessed it, Graphic Design. Where you first learn how to make things “pretty” then you learn how to stick it all on FrontPage and publish it online.
It’s extremely frustrating not being able to apply what I learn at home online in the classroom. Hopefully, one day, it’ll be possible.
Posted on April 24, 2005 03:37 PM | #
27. Andrea said:
Jeremy definitely has a point. But, at least at the institution I work for, the problem is not that web design is taught by graphic designers, but that it is taught by systems folks.
Which I think are both symptoms of the same problem: at many universities web design/development isn’t taught by the web professionals. It is taught by professors with other areas of specialty, and “web” is thrown in as an afterthought. The web isn’t treated as if it is its own field, with its own standards and practices. It is treated as an add-on to another discipline.
I have an incredibly talented student that works for me in the university web office. He has learn the right way to do things at work and by reading blogs at home, rather than in class. Luckily, he was able to realize what he was being taught wasn’t enough and to take matters into his own hands. I worry that there are a lot of students out there that don’t make that realization.
Posted on April 24, 2005 05:15 PM | #
28. Damien Buckley said:
I only joined the web design community less than a year ago and have been hugely (pleasantly) surprised at the communication, support and cameraderie that I’ve found online. Unlike other industries I’ve previously been involved in, most are happy to offer help and competitive issues are usually checked at the door - a true community spirit - and a breath of fresh air.
What surprises me then is that the jobbers don’t get involved - it makes such a difference to the daily effort. It also makes it easier to adopt newer methods and technologies as assistance (or the current crop of excellent books) is usually close to hand. Even the standard bearers are not above emailing a keen adopter - even if the questions (I’m sure) are sometimes benign and frustrating.
Given this climate and the supposed aim to produce better products for our clients I find it hard to see why any web designers would not want to keep up.
At the end of the day though - as I have seen in every other industry I’ve been involved in, competition is very much a Darwinian process and failure to keep up, adapt and strive for improvement only leads in none direction….
So, on that note, thanks to everyone online for being accessible, to the leaders and great authors and the thousands of enthusiasts everywhere that make this one of the most interesting and inclusive industries I’ve been in.
Now, I must get to work on re-doing our site - as I’m sure most of you have experienced - with most time spent on either learning or client work - its usually the last to meet the grade.
Posted on April 24, 2005 06:43 PM | #
29. Mike said:
I’ve noticed that many of the standards-based developers out there are small shops or single folks, and I’ve only gotten into the whole thing in the past two years since I’ve been self-employed.
Consulting at companies of varying sizes, I can remember what it was like at a company. Whereas now I can determine my own workload, at an agency or midsize shop the deadlines can be crazy; meeting them is always more important than progressing.
I don’t know the answer to the issue, but Keith, you’re right about taking work home, and it was a funny catch-22 for me: I started trying to learn more as I got into standards more, and it in turn really renewed my interest in web development in general, making me actually want to work more. So, as with anything, a little education can go a long way.
It’s important to present standards as what they are (standards), but also what they’ve done for us – made coding simpler, HTML more manageable, and design more free and open. In my training I’ve tried to keep those things in mind.
Posted on April 24, 2005 09:35 PM | #
30. Robyn said:
I’ve been making websites (well, mostly crappy websites) for about seven years but didn’t learn anything abouy web standards until last year when I worked at Vassar College’s Media Cloisters. It’s a pretty small school and to my knowledge there aren’t any majors geared towards design or web development so after reading the comments on this page I feel lucky that my supervisor told us about web standards, forcing me to learn as much about it as possible (and leading me to blogs such as this one). I couldn’t even hand code a webpage before I learned XHTML/CSS; why wouldn’t more people want to learn this stuff? Surely the learning curve is low if I could do it. Reading books about web standards has definitely helped and my books are free for the taking…well, borrowing. :)
Posted on April 25, 2005 04:13 AM | #
31. Sally Carson said:
I work for a large e-commerce site, we’ve been interviewing applicants for a Web Designer position for over a year, and almost none of our candidates know anything beyond Dreamweaver WYSIWYG mode. I ask them where they go to stay informed and tapped into the community, and they say either the Macromedia web site, or (gasp) Microsoft!! I ask what their favorite sites are, or where they go for ideas or inspiration, and they shrug or can’t remember.
Our site has a lot of ugly code, nested tables etc, but we’re trying to move away from that. I had been wondering if the savvy web designers out there had viewed our source and decided to not even bother applying. But now, reading over this post, I’m thinking that maybe (unfortunately) what we’re looking for is only a small minority of folks out there.
Maybe a lot of people got involved in this field thinking they would get rich, and don’t really have a thirst for knowledge, or a passion for what they do. And if that’s the case, I’m not sure we can influence those people.
Posted on April 25, 2005 06:33 AM | #
32. steve said:
Keith: like many of your articles, thank you… wonderful stuff and great ideas posed here.
I have to say though, I think most of you are absolutely crazy! The company I work for as a designer has no clue nor care about standards. They use Macromedia Homesite to build sites and attach a seperate CSS file for each page, all generated through Homosite.
The project(s) I work on are validated and run off standards because it is what I am currently excited about and I know the benefits. I try and pass off the ideas but getting an old dog to try a new trick is near impossible.
On my freelance side, I love that in the geographical area I run my freelance business there are absolutely zero businesses promoting web standards… It gives me the opportunity to talk to Cahamber of Commerce groups about the need and benefits of using standards in site development. It gives me an expert level edge that as a freelancer I love!
Yea, sure, it’d be great if more people did it all the same so when I take over someone’s project I’m not cleaing font tags all day, but so what, it’s part of the job. It’s like being in construction and gutting an old room only to find a poorly constructed home that needs to be brought up to today’s standards.
I love learning more about standards and implementing what I learn and think it’s funny because 4 years ago when I graduated school I thought I was king for being the only guy in my web design class to figure out a flexible width page design using tables! Ha!
-steve
Posted on April 25, 2005 08:47 AM | #
33. Kay Smoljak said:
This topic got me so fired up I wrote a huge long post - http://kay.smoljak.com/archives/?fighting-web-standards-blindness/ - a lot of the stuff has already been covered in comments here, but they’re all so important! This is definitely an area where “think globally, act locally” applies :)
Posted on April 25, 2005 09:04 AM | #
34. Ian said:
I don’t know what you guys are complaining about. You know (don’t say webstandards) how to make site using intelligent markup. The least you can do is spread the word. The best you can hope for is that it’ll catch on and you’ll get the job over some FrontPage monkey because of it. I got into this game less than a year ago (more like 6 months!). I dove in with standards in mind, with a goal to learn CSS. I’ve never made a page using tags and I feel pretty lucky. I had to re-teach the web department here at work on why and how CSS, it took a couple of months of Wednesday morning meetings and a lot of questions answered but it was a start %mdash;I’m spreading the word. Furthermore, I’ve put aside a month’s worth of Thursdays to lead a workshop at the local arts center revolving around XHTML and CSS. Part of that lesson will be digging a grave for DW and FP in the students’ minds. If two people leave that class and stick to it, read Zeldman, ALA and JSM, they too will spread the word and we…
Well. We’ll all be out of work. Telling people who design with standards that it has to be done that way does little. You need to reach out to people with interest in it already and nurture that interest.
Posted on April 25, 2005 01:22 PM | #
35. Ben said:
I’m a partner in a small print/web design company in the midwest - we’re not even big fish in our own small pond, but we’ve been doing well, and growing - and the effectiveness of web standards has definitely given us a competitive edge in the local market for producing web sites.
Inside the company we all recognize the benefits and long term goals of web standards, but we spend a lot of time debating how best to express the way we make sites to outsiders. On the simplest level we just make sure to always have a paragraph or two in our proposals explaining the technology used and how it is forward compatible, degrades well, and is accessible.
What sells though is that web standards mean we can make the sites quicker, cheaper, more search engine friendly*, and we can spend a little bit of time just educating, not selling.
We’ve only once had a client come to usk and ask about compliance, but several have told us they like our approach much better - most of the companies in the area still act like it’s a black art, or else they follow the old per-page, per-image pricing model. We explain that we’ve found that standards free us from a lot of those constraints.
It does put us in a strange position though - the incentive for us, in the local market at least is to spread the word to clients / potential clients, but to be secretive relating to other designers and companies. In a business sense we WANT them to stay bloated, slow and overpriced. We want to be the lean machine and be able to point out how our projects can be accomplished faster, easier and cheaper (while also being more profitable for us!). Even if we lose a client to another company, in 3 months we often see their new site, bloated, excessively table based, often still with font tags and little to no CSS at all. Those companies go back in the hopper for future contacts. Often we’ll also see they continue to have lousy search visibility (not that we’re crazy SEM’s), and we know just some simple recoding could rocket up their rankings. To be honest, it’s nice to have another company do the dirty work of gathering content, getting the client organized, etc. etc., and be able to step in a year later and swoop them up.
I think a lot of it has to do with whether or not a web designer is a graphic/print designer first who has come late to the HTML ball, or a computer-geek turned designer who ‘gets’ the internet. Larger, established agencies seem to have more of the former, smaller shops, more of the latter.
The thing is, the larger shops also have good salespeople, account reps, money for marketing, etc. etc. We’ve just began to actually develop a dedicated sales force - and part of our training has been to make sure they understand the benefits of web standards for clients - it seems like that might be the most important step - like Keith’s article says, preaching to the choir doesn’t do much good, but getting an awesome extrovert with excellent people skills to sing CSS’s praises might do wonders.
Posted on April 26, 2005 07:24 AM | #
36. Susan said:
I have been reading your comments with much interest. I’m the Information Technology teacher at a small, rural Georgia high school. Next year, I will start teaching web design to our seniors and a few juniors. I’ve been a dabbler for years, and was even our county web-coordinator for awhile. I came to the business through programming as opposed to graphic design. I want to teach my kids the “right” way. Can you help? I want to know how to start them off right, keep them on track, and get them prepared for the real world of QUALITY web design. I’ll happily read any suggestions that you have.
Posted on April 26, 2005 08:14 AM | #
37. Keith said:
Susan – You might start by reading Designing With Web Standards by Zeldman. That is a pretty good intro that would help quite a bit. As well I recommend Don’t Make Me Think by Krug as it talks a bit about the importance of user-centered design and it’s a pretty quick read and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm as it’s a good, hands on book.
Oh, and keep reading blogs like mine. If you go back into my archives you’ll probably find all sorts of nuggest that will help you out.
Everyone – I just wanted to chime in and say thanks to all the readers who commented on this thread. There are some very well thought out and insightful comments and there! I’m glad to see that these issues are still a big deal in many people’s mind. Web standards are good for the Web and it’s important to not forget how many people out there are still unaware of the benefits.
Thanks again!
Posted on April 26, 2005 08:46 AM | #
38. Eric said:
Of course, it might help if we could even agree on what “web standards” we’re talking about. For some, a table-free layout seems to be the “Holy Grail” of standards-based design. [Given that, who’s gonna tell Zeldman how wrong he got it in “Designing with Web Standards”?] So, explain again how a net savings of a handful of characters in the source code on a simple website that looks ugly in non-compliant browsers is advancing the cause of standards, when that same site with one table setting the primary layout looks great in ALL browsers?
My point is simply that unless and until web designers AND their clients understand that using web standards will make them more money, it’s all just an academic exercise. And, frankly, strict adherence to web standards does not meet that foundational criterion in every case.
Posted on April 26, 2005 01:34 PM | #
39. Jordan Moore said:
I’ve been battling on the front lines for Web standards lately. No more than two weeks ago, I was able to “convert” one of my professors at Olmypic College to using Web standards. Unfortunately, he’s not the primary professor for most our Web development classes – only ASP.NET.
For all of us students, we need to inform our professors of the benefits of Web standards. Lend/buy them books by Zeldman, Cederholm, Molly, or others who are fighting for Web standards. Write a report or proposal about it. Do whatever you can to educate your professors, and in turn, you will be educating future students.
Posted on April 26, 2005 02:00 PM | #
40. Peter Powell said:
I have been in this industry since 1992 and have been an advocate of Web Standards for the past few years. And you’re right-it is hard to get web professionals to understand the issue at hand.
Why should they? This industry is so varied these days that it’s becoming almost impossible to keep up with all that is happening to technologies at the back end, the front end or even the operating systems.
I agree that the only people who can help promote web standards are the people who pay. They are motivated by the dollar and the pain of project delivery at any cost.
I am currently working at a government department focused on disability issues yet the initial project team failed to check what government standards they needed to comply to, let alone what web standards were out there. Consequently the budget did not include the cost of compliance so compliance to any standards (web or otherwise) was ignored.
Maybe in stage 2 when the cost of ignorance meets the cost of litigation the standards will be looked at.
Posted on April 27, 2005 04:22 PM | #
41. Danny Halarewich said:
Benifits, benifits, benifits, and more benifits.
I wont go buy a new blender unless someone can show me why my current blender is not right and the new standard in blending benifits in speed, it cleans easier, and it just plain blends better.
Likewise nobody is going to adopt any standard practices no matter how great they sound. Without demonstration of astandards vs non-standards way of comparison I dont think a person would “convert”.
I am currently working on a easy way to make this comparison. “this site uses tables… this site uses CSS” “both look the same, but the CSS based site is faster, more compatible, easier to maintain, more flexible, etc. etc. benifits, benifits”
Posted on April 27, 2005 09:10 PM | #
42. Kathy said:
I think Susan used a keyword–quality. In almost every field and industry there are those who aim for quality because it pays and those who aim for quality because they care. The latter is usually a pretty small group, and to their credit, they’re often mystified by the attitude of the majority. Unfortunately, you can’t make someone care who, well, doesn’t care–altruism is something they’re just not going to “get.” That leaves money. Fortunately, as we all know, adhering to web standards does pay off. Once people realize web standards save money, no force on earth with keep it from going mainstream. It’s going to happen, folks. Maybe might for the best reasons, but it is going to happen.
Posted on May 19, 2005 03:25 PM | #
43. Gjermund said:
The problem with the Web Standards-communities is that they consist of way too many fanatics. People who study a site’s code rather then design, and is constantly telling people what’s the right thing to do. These people can be really provocative, and is destroying the positive css-trend that’s come along the past few years.
I’ve been to some of these communities myself, and I’ve watched people being denied help because their webpage consisted of a table or two. That’s just terribly wrong, and when everything gets that black and white, we have a problem. Using flash is not a sin. Wrapping a page in a table isn’t wrong. The thing is to be conscious on how things work and affect your (target) audience. If it works, don’t refuse to use it because it’s not 100% semantic.
Posted on June 10, 2005 11:08 AM | #
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