Few Standards Developers Still
The below article on the site thinkvitamin.com by Roger Johansson of 456bereastreet.com caught my eye today. Working full time in the field I am astonished that so few are following CSS Standards based design. Although I am aware that few developers are changing obsolete methods to embrace new methods of global standards for the internet, I never realized how bad it still is.
Having came from a construction background many years ago, I find comparisons to buildings work fine.
Scenario:
A well meaning contractor tells a home owner they need a new foundation. The contractor, a leader in his field, says, “We did an engineers study of your foundations. They will soon no longer hold up your house, and it will collapse.”
Homeowner: “I just painted and wallpapered my house, I am very comfortable, and besides, it looks really nice now. I don’t believe you and see no need to change anything. Even my neighbours have said how nice it looks. Now get out of here.”
That house is very likely your website, and the attitude of the homeowner is the attitude of most web developers and site owners today.
Vitamin Features ? Why standards still matter
by Roger Johansson
456BereaStreet
The clued-in are a small minority
If you really think that the majority of people in the Web business have fully embraced Web standards, accessibility, and usability, and strive to follow best practices in general in their work, I’d like to know what planet you’re living on. On Planet Earth, standards-aware Web designers and developers are still a tiny minority of the people working in the Web business. Tiny. We may be vocal, and we may be the ones writing articles and books, but we are seriously outnumbered…It is my firm belief that Web standards are just as important to talk about now as five years ago or last week. The message needs to be repeated over and over again as long as the vast majority of Web workers continue to produce sub-standard websites.
The problem is how to deliver that message to more people than those who already know…
I find this startling, but as I travel around the web in my daily work I am not surprised. Few developers bother and still produce sites that are obsolete and destined to fail as the world’s browser makers and internet device manufacturers embrace Standards and XML technology. Unfortunately consumers are paying for site design and development based on visual esthetics alone. Pst: your house is going to fall down.
This is not a new fad! It is foundational for all future internet development for all internet aware devices. No future developments will replace these standards, they will add to them and round them out more. these will not change in any major way any more than the inch or meter will.
I believe the main reason why is most developers were taught that way, learned that way, and as the sites they develop are still working they see no need for change. And who likes change?
Those developing sites still using what the more aware developers call tag soup, and using tables and old 1996 font tags etc throughout their markup are in for a rude awakening and are doing their clients a grave injustice…
What is needed is not to give all our efforts to trying to educate web developers, but rather to educate the public about the reasons for Web Standards and the many benefits. I feel this is the way to go, for then seeing these reasons and benefits they will be in an informed position to demand future compatable Standard based sites.
We’re always excited when a developer, customer, or partner takes such great interest in our products and in our community that they spend the time and effort to contribute their own improvements. I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with software engineer and web standards aficionado Joe D’Andrea who has made it his personal mission to take our Google Search Appliance into the wonderful world of web standards compliance. He’s created a new XSLT stylesheet that displays our search results in a way that conforms to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 specifications. In doing so he’s completely separated the markup from the styling in our default stylesheet.
What does this mean to you? Well for starters it means that you could install this single stylesheet into your Google Search Appliance and provide a search experience that automatically adapts to the device its being viewed on! On a computer screen Joe provides the familar look we all love. On printed paper the astute eye notices some added conveniences. What about a mobile phone? Ok, now we’re talking. The drastic transformation into a Google Mobile-like interface seems like magic. But thats nothing. Go ahead and try your favorite text-based or speech-based browser! Ah, there’s nothing quite like having your search results read to you like poetic verse…
Google Enterprise
Google Enterprise for business.
We are talking about the separation of content from sructure using CSS and proper formatting methods. The above is only possible when that is a prerequisite. I daily see sites where changing the content is a major undertaking with it wrapped up in convoluted tables within tables, font tags, spacer images and on and on. This is a ridiculous situation that has to change, and it is going to.
It’s commonplace to see in menus forty to sixty completely unnecessary lines of code that can be replaced with six or eight using proper CSS that is supported in all browsers. Then try changing the text color on that menu on 2,000 pages you get the idea, considering one could make changes in one place and update the entire site using css.
When I started doing websites back in the middle 90’s I remember articles and a major book released, “Creating Killer Websites” by David Siegel. Many followed suit as at the time using tables and tag soup was the method of formatting content.
But today?
I ruined the Web by mixing chocolate and peanut butter so they could never become unmixed. I committed the hangable offense of mixing structure with presentation, and in HTML and SGML circles, that’s a big no-no. The reason the HTML purists never carried out their threats is not that they’re against violence, it’s that they know that if they kill me, someone else will rise to take my place. It seems that structure and presentation have been mixed forever, and the Web is in the fast lane of the road to Hell. Fortunately, nothing on the Web is what it seems, and “forever” lasts only about six months…
Step one. The Framers of the Web mark up their papers on their NeXT machines and put them on the first Web servers, delighted to be avoiding FedEx charges to their limited particle-physics budgets. The <IMG> tag makes the Web visual, and products like PageMill reinforce the ugly-factor of first-generation sites.
Step two. I come along and start laying out pages visually, using HTML (admittedly, a markup language, not a page-description language) as it was never intended to be used. I pour narrative text into tables, completely hosing the idea that tables should be used for tabular material. My sites become popular. People start doing what I’m doing. I write a book explaining how to do it, and it becomes the Amazon.com number one best-selling book of 1996 in five months. The Web falls apart quickly. The search engines can’t tell a picture of Dolly Parton from a picture of Dolly the sheep.
More on standards based design for business at The Web Standards Project