The Web Standards movement vs. practicality.
February 13, 2005
In this article I am going to look as some of the practices that are promoted by the Web Standards movement, practices that cost web designers (and their clients,) time and money for no real practical advantage.
CODE VALIDATION: validating your web pages.
Web Standards zealots advocate checking of code against an ‘engine’ (W3C validator ) to verify that your code is not breaking any Web Standards rules. This is fine, but it should be the ‘icing on the cake’ and not the focus.
Before you validate using the W3C validator (who’s engine does not reflect most of the browsers being used,) you should ‘validate’ your code against the target market – Internet Explorer and then (a distant 2nd) FireFox.
THE ORDER OF REAL-WORLD VALIDATION:
- Check against Internet Explorer – the most used browser.
- Check against FireFox.
- Check against the w3c validator: if you have time to burn.
TOO MUCH FOCUS ON CODE AND NOT ENOUGH ON THE JOB.
Web design is not a mathematical equation to be balanced – it is about creating engaging websites that work well for most web surfers. The Web Standards movement has created a culture of overly anal and obsessed code monkeys.
Validated and validating code does not make a great website. Your clients will not care if you code validates and people surfing the web will not care either – unless they’re Web Standards zealots!
PERCEPTIONS REGARDING THE BROWSERS:
Web Standards zealots seem to be in denial, where they consider Internet Explorer as just ‘one of the browsers’.
This makes no sense given that IE has about a 70%+ share of the market – Internet Explorer is the ‘cock of the walk’ and will likely dominate for at least a few more years because most people don’t care about what browser they are using.
Further to this, they seem to discount and treat IE like a second class citizen because it has a buggier implementation of the standards.
Remember this rule: The percentage of your concentration ( given to a browser,) should be equal to the percentage of a browser’s penetration.
CONCLUSION:
Standards are put into to place (in any field) to save time and money. There is without a doubt, good reasons to use Web Standards based design. But, when a standard starts to interfere with practical work, we need to re-evaluate.
Currently, using CSS to create page-level design is harder (more costly,) than using tables for many common layouts. The problem comes from the fact that the constructs/methods (floats, margins et cetera,) used for page-level layout are buggy.
I would also argue that the tools that CSS provides for page-level layout are weak to begin with – we need something better . For example: we need to see the CSS3 multi-column spec to come of age.
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I am not saying that we should all go back to table based design and drop CSS for page-level layout. I am saying that we should consider the use of tables in situations where CSS is just causing too many problems -the so-called ‘hybrid’ website is sometimes a great way to go.
… let’s face it, there are certain layouts that are a snap to build with tables but are tricky and bug prone with CSS – many times I don’t think it is worth the trouble.
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So ends my rant against the Web Standards movement.
PS: For those of you that I may have offended – I will accept cage-match challenges as long you can cover your travel and funeral expenses. There will also be a small charge ($29.99) to cover registration and scheduling.
🙂
Do only that which makes sense, and nothing more.
Stef
