1 Nice Article

A good mix of general and specific points.

Whenever I hear someone the web standards movement is elitist and pedantic I am reminded of the argument that Zeldman made years ago. Standards are all about the bottom line. At the time I didn’t really understand that, because my own use of CSS grew slowly and it was hard to notice the improvement. But this year when I took a job at an agency where they still barely know what CSS is I discovered the painful truth. Bloated table designs can raise development costs by very large factors. Worse yet, they can create situations for application developers where templates balloon out of control and require baroque display logic that destroys readability.

The idea that your code needs to validate perfectly and not use any CSS hacks is pedantic. Web standards in general, and CSS in particular is first and foremost pragmatic.

posted at 07:23 am on September 26, 2006 by Gabe da Silveira

2 The struggle for validation

While I agree that validation must sometimes be sacrificed in favour of what is practicable, I’ve always found validation invaluable for learning new tricks.

With each site you work on the validation process will throw up another gem that you didn’t know about – whether from a standards-compliance or an accessibility point of view.

Yes, where the costs of validation outweigh the potential benefits, you’ll have to make a compromise. However, where the pain of transitioning to standards-compliant code is concerned, validation can be an enlightening experience.

posted at 07:59 am on September 26, 2006 by Gerard McGarry

3 Just excellent!

Congratulations on this superb piece!

It’s really refreshing to read an article covering some of the issues we face concerning real world implementation of web standards. Far too many standardista’s dismiss any website that fails validation or uses a less-than-semantically-perfect piece of mark up due to an ill advised decision by a project stakeholder.

“Choose your ground, pick your battles… and fight the ones you can actually win.” – This pretty much sums my past 3 years, struggling to introduce a web standards approach to a digital agency.

Bravo

posted at 09:24 am on September 26, 2006 by Julian Guy

4 Untitled

I am always amused when someone talks about trading validation for some mysterious pragmatic reasons. Unless you are stuck with
crappy CMS or some system which allows html mess in users submited comments – I can see no reasons for tradeoffs.

posted at 10:04 am on September 26, 2006 by Rimantas Liubertas

5 Good Article

Thanks for this good article. Sometimes it feels so much easier to stick to the “old” style of producing web pages and I understand that it takes years to adjust. For me as a programmer it might be not as hard as for a designer or artist. Im used to see aesthetic not only in the presentation, but also in the code. Therefore I totally agree to Saint-Excupery…

posted at 11:31 am on September 26, 2006 by Andreas Berg

6 Very well Said

Right from the beginning you had my attention – because I was the same way. I KNEW the benefits of CSS – but it was psuedo CSS I was using, and it was still mixed with tables every now and then. I look back and laugh at some of my projects then – but it was all I knew. I then took the time to read read and read some more to really grasp CSS, the browsers, and how things are rendered.

I think this is a great article with some excellent points.

posted at 02:42 pm on September 26, 2006 by Nate Klaiber

7 Get stuck in

Another excellent article outlining the constant battle we all face when developing with CSS. My advice is to get stuck in and keep persevering. It can be de-motivating at times when having to use browser hacks (oh the irony) and it’s certainly not an easy ride and full of headaches, but the feeling at the end is worth it. There’s no real excuse with the acres of CSS related articles and resources out there!

posted at 04:03 pm on September 26, 2006 by Andy Crathorne

8 Finally... Kind words for the "Standards-challenge

It’s so refreshing to read an article on Web Standards that doesn’t vilify the thousands of quality, hard-working designers out there that weren’t exposed to CSS early on. I started my career in web design in 1998 and all the training I got was in table-based layout. It would be nice to just turn on a switch and say “I’m going to follow web standards now”, but I can’t. That’s like saying, “I’m going to start speaking Spanish today. It’s a much more efficient language.”

Now that I’m designing full-time, it’s really hard to find the time to train myself in the new standards (I actually enjoy getting away from the computer in my free time). So for me (and MANY others like me), it’s going to be a long road to completely saying “goodbye” to tables. Thanks for cutting us some slack. There are a lot of great designers out there that have just been a little misguided.

posted at 04:25 pm on September 26, 2006 by Boots !!!

9 Drawbacks of CSS

Thank you for outlining the numerous drawbacks and disadvantages of CSS. As a website optimizer I have to stick to clean markup and standards but I feel reminded of the days of Netscape 4 all the time. Back then we had to code JavScript for two different browsers, the HTML was quite the same on both major ones. Nowadays we have several brwowsers every one of them dealing differently with CSS and so called web standards. I would love those standards if they would work. Having to fight float and padding bugs and such on a daily basis I wish I could do table layouts once again. At least those work everywhere.
I quit flash programming a while ago because of it’s by now ludicrous complexity that renders it worthless for simple sites.
If I had an alternative I would also quit CSS. It’s a constant annoyance and you can’t even use more than the system fonts until now (we’re in 2006 and were supposed to have flying cars by now!).

The CSS believers are fighting a just war but in the daily routine CSS sucks. You have to make too many compromises and fight too many inconsistencies. Often I miss the crossbrowser compatibility of flash. I hope that one day we will be able to code websies in SVG, vector based and looking everywhere the same.

posted at 04:29 pm on September 26, 2006 by Tadeusz Szewczyk

10 Very Helpful

Great article. I’ll make sure to apply these on my upcoming project! I tend to have problems w/ CSS layouts @ times, but step 11 is a great reminder for those having troubles w/ layout and floats. Thanks!

posted at 05:53 pm on September 26, 2006 by Max Hyatt

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