21 Not Sure If I am ready to...

“I have so far found exactly one of my clients that cares about validated code … …don’t know if it’s worth the trouble to update my sites to xhtml yet…”

I think about it in terms of best practices. At this point, the use of XHMTL and CSS is a best practice, and all clients are entitled to best practices, even if they do not ask for them.

If you were to hire a contractor to build a house for you, you might not specify or understand the best practices of that profession, but you would hope to dear God that the contractor would build according to them.

Shouldn’t we expect the same from web site construction?

posted at 10:49 am on April 10, 2002 by Carrie Bickner

22 Best Practices

“If you were to hire a contractor to build a house for you, you might not specify or understand the best practices of that profession, but you would hope to dear God that the contractor would build according to them.”

First of all, I was glad to hear another opinion on my comment. However…

IMO I don’t think that’s a valid analogy … I think of it more like an interior designer … if you give her $50,000 to redo your kitchen, you can expect Italian granite countertops, but if you give her $10,000 you might end up with Formica. =)

Since my clients are mostly small businesses with very tiny budgets, it isn’t cost-effective for me to take 3x the time on each site. For most of my clients, I’m developing their initial web presence. I have to explain interactive features to them, most of them come to me wanting brochureware.

For example, I don’t support browsers lower than 4.x … but if a client and I determine that his/her customers are likely to be on terribly outdated browsers, I change my approach. I also don’t test as rigorously as I might if I worked for a corporation with serious money invested in usability. I’ve worked for those corps before, it was fun, but I don’t have the time. I’ll test the major browsers on the major OS, but I don’t test IE 3.0 on a five-year-old Mac.

posted at 11:08 am on April 10, 2002 by Johannah

23 Best Practices

One more thing that occurred to me … the term “best practices” … I’m curious as to corporate web designers’ experience … have you ever found a company that did more with “best practices” than wave around the doc? I find this terribly amusing since I worked for a company in Boston for a long time that had binders and binders full of usability best practices that they never used. Maybe it’s just a management issue. I’m curious to see if anyone has ever worked for a large corp that “does it right.”

posted at 11:11 am on April 10, 2002 by Johannah

24 A consumer reports

Tried Dreamweaver. Tried GoLive. Tried Dreamweaver again. Tried GoLive again. I keep going back to HomeSite.

And I am SO glad this forum is back! Thank you, ALA

posted at 12:14 pm on April 10, 2002 by Deb

25 Sick of Eliteist BULLSHIT

Who are you people who think your code is better than some generated by a WYSIWYG editor? I didn’t realize that the browsers would find your tags much more appealing. A is a fucking . “OH I CREATE WAY BETTER CODE” give me a break you elitest prick. I’ve handcoded all my life, and don’t have time to worry about spelling mistakes and other slight typos that plague handcoders. Granted after I’m done WYSIWYG editing, I WILL comb through the code and tidy it up. These editors are by no means perfect, but the time saved from cleaning up their code rather than starting from scratch and typing out every single tag is huge. I’m just so sick of people looking down their noses at designers such as myself because I use gasp Dreamweaver.

posted at 01:09 pm on April 10, 2002 by WYSIWYG

26 Best Practices

“Since my clients are mostly small businesses with very tiny budgets, it isn’t cost-effective for me to take 3x the time on each site.” — By Johannah

It think that the term Best Practices applies in more than one way.

If you write valid XHTML code all the time, with practice it won’t take you much more time in coding alone than writing any non-valid code. Plus the validators provided by the W3C and others will help you find errors in your code and you can have a more consistent expectation of what your code will output, which will save you debugging time.

Granted, it will take you longer to code at first, but as you use it, you will start saving time in coding alone, not to mention maintenance. Now I am speaking from a hand-coding perspective [HTML-Kit (http://www.chami.com/)] and I have very little experience using authoring tools as I am a code-control freak.

As far as Corp’s doing it right, I can say that very few companies I have programmed for care about standards or accessibility as more than a checkbox to check off if at all. However, I feel that it’s in my best interests in the long term to code no other way. So I do not and will not.

posted at 01:13 pm on April 10, 2002 by Jeff Carr

27 It's all personal preference

Well … though I think you might be getting a little too confrontational about it …

I can see both preferences. I was “raised” on Notepad, and had never even heard of an html editor until I got my first “real design job” at a consulting company. It was like my first hit of acid when someone opened up HomeSite and showed me all of the color-coding and tag completion. I nearly wet myself when I saw the extended find and replace. For a couple of years I was a HomeSite convert … I tried Dreamweaver a few times because the other designers used it for mock-ups … but since the code (DW 2 and 3) was still not great, I had to fix it in HomeSite to get what I wanted.

I’ve only just begun to rely heavily on DW4 this past year. It’s just what you’re used to … some people prefer to use their tried-and-true tools, some people like to try the new stuff, ever hoping for a more perfect tool.

posted at 01:17 pm on April 10, 2002 by Johannah

28 threading

Just a quick note, my reply “It’s all personal preference” was to “WYSIWYG” and not to Jeff Carr.

posted at 01:19 pm on April 10, 2002 by Johannah

29 Best Practices

“Since my clients are mostly small businesses with very tiny budgets, it isn’t cost-effective for me to take 3x the time on each site.” I totally understand the situation, Johannah, and that is why I wrote the article. I wanted to make authoring in XHTML less time-consuming enterprise.

I don’t want to pick too much, but I would stick to the home building analogy and shift away from the interior design analogy. We are talking about a site’s structure. The granite counter tops might be more analogous to having Matt Owens come in a build the flash stuff for you.

As for my own work, I do not do big corporate sites, but I do manage a large non-profit site. One of my biggest responsibilities is making sure that the scraps of money that we do find are used as effectively as possible. Building a standards-compliant site is the best way to do that. I think this is our strongest chance for having sites that work over time, and on different receiving devices.

As for the WYSIWYG/text editor question, what ever gets the job done.
Ask me about boxers vs. briefs, and I’ll be happy to weigh in.

posted at 02:15 pm on April 10, 2002 by Carrie Bickner

30 Re: Eliteist Bullshit

WYSIWYG wrote:
“Who are you people who think your code is better than some generated by a WYSIWYG editor?”

We are professional web developers and designers who see that the adoption of web standards is a clear solution to creating forward compatible web documents and minimizing costs associated with site maintenance.

There are tremendous benefits inherent in adopting standards, but the benefits can only be realized if a majority of parties that work to create the Web use them.

Standards-compliant code is better than non-compliant WYSIWYG code because of these benefits (which I won’t go into here, they are detailed in a number of places on the Web).

“I didn’t realize that the browsers would find your tags much more appealing.”

Well, now you know. But I smell sarcasm, so I suppose I’ll have to explain it. Browsers that properly implement standards do find standards-compliant markup more appealing in the sense that they render the markup consistently. Assistive technologies for the disabled like them better, too. And so will the next generation of search engines, or have you not yet heard of the Semantic Web?

“A is a fucking . “

Wrong. It’s a .

“I’ve handcoded all my life, and don’t have time to worry about spelling mistakes and other slight typos that plague handcoders.”

Yeah, us handcoders have it tough. We must have no clue. Us and all of the programmers. And writers. But I guess that’s why they invented spell check. And markup validators.

“These editors are by no means perfect, but the time saved from cleaning up their code rather than starting from scratch and typing out every single tag is huge.”

I can build a page by hand just as quickly, if not faster, as I can in Dreamweaver. The one I coded by hand is standards compliant and accessible. YMMV.

“I’m just so sick of people looking down their noses at designers such as myself because I use gasp Dreamweaver. “

I don’t look down my nose at you because you use Dreamweaver. I look down my nose at you because you are a rude troll.

posted at 06:31 pm on April 10, 2002 by Eliteist Prick