21 a glimmer of hope...

[blockquote]True, but is it enough? Recently I’m starting to doubt whether the standards movement in its current form will reach much beyond its current audience; that’s why I wrote this article.[/blockquote]

I am here to offer a glimmer of hope. I was hired 3 years ago by a US government agency to work as a member of their web team precisely because I had experience with building accessible, standards complaint XHTML and CSS for layout. Now I create templates for numerous high profile sites both public and internal. My experience continues to be a rare opportunity to teach other developers and ‘web designers’ about web-standards and the many benefits of CSS layouts. This opportunity happened because I was interviewed by one person who cared about web-standards.
My team members think I should write more about my experience but I never seem to have enough time.

posted at 08:01 pm on May 31, 2007 by Laura Keen

22 Non Standards Work

I work for a mega-huge company (employees in the 1000’s) and mostly write web apps for internal use.

Mega-Corps have 1000’s and 1000’s of existing pages for applications which see internal use only. The only way they will be re-written is when browsers stop supporting them.

There is absolutly no way you will be able to convince a large company to pony up the money to convert 1000’s of pages of code just to make them “standard”.

Face it non-standard pages still “work”. Additionally a lot of the standards yelling and shouting is seen as silly and non productive in the corporate world.

“Lets dump quriky non-standard javascript hacks for quirkily supported CSS hacks”

“Lets stop using HTML tag properties which have been around since 1996 and replace them with CSS and embeded style definitions that requrire more syntax to accomplish the same job”

Why? – Well, not because anything will actually look different on the page – Not because the customers will get any new functionality – We’re going to do it because some weird college kids say that it is not “standard” now – When it was “standard” when the page was written.

What’s to guarnatee that after spending the money to meet this “standard” that a year or two from now someone will come up with another aribtary standard – invalidating all the previous work done?

posted at 08:20 pm on May 31, 2007 by Stan Slaughter

23 so-called standards?

@“stan”:http://www.alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies/?page=3#32 : The standards you put in quotes have been around for seven years and more. It’s not the flavor of the month that we’re talking about. And there are advantages to adopting them. Read a little deeper sites like this one. Pick up a book by Zeldman, Kruck, PPK, Meyer or others.

Yes, non-standards work. For you. They don’t often work for blind users. They hurt your search engine rankings. They create more page bloat. You might say that those points don’t matter in an internal corporate environment. Fine. But being among a minority group of Mac users in one of these environments (dozens among tens of thousands), I am completely unable to access most of an intranet that is supposed to serve me (because the guys that did it say, “it works for me!â€?

posted at 10:05 pm on May 31, 2007 by John Lascurettes

24 Web-Based applications

I work in a very big company, and one of our products is a Web-Based CRM platform. I am in charge of front-end coding.

The application itself is composed of 1000s of pages that were written using table based layouts.

Our development team consists of around 8 people doing the main development work, which means they do the server-side and also the related front-end pages. Although they know, through me, about standards, they are just so swamped in work that they don’t have time to learn how to code standards compliant pages. They don’t have time to test in multiple browsers.

Even if they did, they wouldn’t do it, JAVA devs are spoiled in that they can write-once-run-anywhere. We web-people have to use xHTML/CSS/JS at the same time, and have to get it working on at least 2 platforms, IE and FF simultaneously. Standards are standards, but the browsers all implement it differently, so you still have to make sure that you use a subset of standards that do work consistently.

Although management wants all the advantages of a standards-based design, they do not assign any resources to fix the existing pages. I have no time to help them, its 8 vs. 1 developer. If I tried, I wouldn’t be able to catch up, and I wouldn’t be able to attend to my other tasks.

I’m now trying to develop a framework, that would shield the devs from the xHTML/CSS/JS. It would be a sort of meta-language in JAVA that will let them describe the parts of the page, without letting them specifying each pixel. It would let them do what they do best, without worrying about browser quirks. Hopefully this would make it into the next major version of our application…

posted at 04:06 am on June 1, 2007 by Jonathan Lui

25 Untitled

John Lascurettes – in reference to your response.

This is not a personal viewpoint which can be changed on a whim. This is an attitude thats pretty prevalent in the corporate business world. Telling me to read books I’ve all ready read and to visit sites I obviously visit – totally misses the point. The problem is in convincing businesses that they should start following standards.

The Standards web geeks tend to think that the Internet is the end-all-be-all of web development. Those that believe that are wrong. There are as many web pages designed for web applications which run on a companies internal network as there are pages on the Internet.

If they want standards to start being implemented there then they need to come up with better arguments for a buisness to invest its money in revamping its old code. For Internally designed web apps:

Most Internet web sites only have a handful of pages to maintain and they tend to have very limited data to display which lends itself to layouts which favor wide area block level designs. Things that DIV tags are good at.

Internal apps typically involve querying databases to return multiple rows of data that need to be sorted and analyzed. Telling people not to use tables for this is absolutely 100% wrong.

I am working on a web app right now that involves over 387 seperate JSP pages (with their accompanying java apps/etc.). I’m adding additional functionality on a few extra pages. So what am I to do – write these pages in a way that is totally non-standard to the format that is used by the 387 others (regardless of how non-web2.0 it may be), or follow their standard so future developers will have an easier time maintaining it?

posted at 04:10 pm on June 1, 2007 by Stan Slaughter

26 Getting the message across

@Stan
I can see where you’re coming from. I think, while web standards developers get all of this stuff and they’ll continue to influence the non-standards based developers where they can, it’s those making the decisions that need to be influenced. You’re right when you say that most non-techie people focus on the screen, on what a page looks like. If we as developers make suggestions about introducing web standards and it doesn’t affect the look of the page or dramatically affect the performance of the site, no wonder web standards get put as a low priority.

Because the changes are ‘behind the scenes’ I think the way forward is to convince the non-techie decision makers that web standards are a good idea for other reasons:

• future maintenance
• web standards makes it easier to add new features in the future
• web standards allow the design (css) and the code to be completely separate

• web standards allows products to be sold into other markets (the large group of disabled users on the web and those using other devices)

Another powerful device is show the decision makers other rival web sites that have introduced standards. A bit of business related jealousy would do no harm in pushing web standards.

I can see that this isn’t going to work for intranets but surely they’re less of an issue as you can control the browsers people use etc…

Your comment about managers being suspicious of web standards being a ‘fad’ is another good point. It’s all well and good bleating about the fact that they’ve been around for ages, but non-techie decision makers are bound to be suspicious unless they see some benefit to their business and their profits.

One final comment.

Internal apps typically involve querying databases to return multiple rows of data that need to be sorted and analyzed. Telling people not to use tables for this is absolutely 100% wrong.

If you’re talking about displaying data in tables – why is this a problem? That’s what html tables are for aren’t they?

posted at 04:53 pm on June 1, 2007 by Matt Newboult

27 Pitch web standards as part of the total package

You’ll never be able to convince clients/management that standards are worth the development time on their own – instead make it part of the whole CSS based design experience then rattle all of the benefits of the total package.

My pitch is that lightweight design that makes for greater website performance and lower bandwidth costs, sites are significantly easier to update & maintain in addition to reducing the possibilities of user error (find-replace anyone?), and then the fact that search engines seem to like standards compliant websites. The SEO factor usually settles things.

Another thing that works well is to bill CSS based design as the ‘latest and greatest’ technology. Execs are always falling in love with the latest annoying web gimmick, and it’s nice to use this for good and not for evil once in a while.

posted at 08:02 pm on June 1, 2007 by Jerrol Krause

28 Nothing succeeds like success

I work at a mega-gigantic web corporation (10,000+ employees across the world, and hundreds of millions of users.) While we don’t exactly model PPK’s definition of “Web company,” since we don’t (often) create websites for others, we do offer end users: games, instant messaging, news, sports, mail, search, photo-sharing, a top-notch Javascript and CSS framework, and a host of other services, many of which start with “Y!” ;)

Yahoo is a huge proponent of web standards, for very pragmatic reasons. On most teams, you can’t get hired as even a junior web developer without a solid background in standards and CSS. At the same time, we host countless 1990-style table-based layout pages, and most of them probably won’t be changed any time soon. And yes, some of our internal web apps are simply godaweful.

The all-too-common focus on refactoring legacy pages is misguided and hopeless. There is little, if any, benefit to make up for the herculean effort. However, web companies are typically in the business of creating new pages, and this is where the standards movement should move. When an old system is refactored, it’s often a wholescale redesign, and that’s when a proper approach should be used. Extending a system should almost always use the language of the existing system, and sometimes, yes, that means that you implement the 254th page as table-soup so that it matches the pattern of the other 253.

When it comes to new development, it’s a much easier sell. First, you say, “I’m going to implement this using web standards because it’s better.” (Or don’t say it—just do it.) If that doesn’t work (and it usually does), then you point to the huge sites that have used web standards to great advantage—sites like Yahoo, Blogger, ESPN, and others. Talk about their agility, their reach, how this is the new standard. Get involved in the hiring process, and try to hire developers who know about standards. (Usually they’re the best choice anyhow.)

If that doesn’t work, then build a resume in modern HTML and CSS, put it online, and get ready to move to California. (Seriously, as more employers move to using web standards, it’s getting harder to find good web developers these days. You’re valuable!) As more standards-using webdevs reach career-maturity, web companies will necessarily shift in that direction, and devs who don’t use these methods will find themselves working somewhere else.

Lastly, please, abandon the religious viewpoint. Software is the art of effective trade-offs. It’s not math, and there is usually not just one right answer. It does so happen that web standards can be leveraged in many cases to make a big profit in time, effort, and features, but if you’re in this business long enough as one of PPK’s “invisible professionals,” you’ll eventually find a case where you need a layout table to achieve a certain effect, or where a table-based approach is faster/easier/more maintainable, and the costs are reasonable. W3C approval doesn’t not make something necessarily a good method. If you’re going to be a zealot, be a zealot about writing high-quality code—usually that means standards, but standards are not a valid end in themselves. I feel like blogging a big fat rant when I can’t buy movie tickets on my Blackjack, but web standards zealotry is perceived as naive and misguided by managers and customers alike.

posted at 07:14 pm on June 4, 2007 by Isaac Schlueter

29 Untitled

Isaac ,

Great point Many great points! Thank you.

posted at 07:49 pm on June 4, 2007 by John Lascurettes

30 Super - Huge - Mega corporations?

I’m still disappointed that my employer (of more than 100,000 employees, billions of dollars of profit, In just about every country in the world) still uses tables for layout on their second tier pages…

posted at 12:25 am on June 5, 2007 by Iain Hosking

Got something to say?

Discuss this article. We reserve the right to delete flames, trolls, and wood nymphs.

Create a new account or sign in below if you’d like to leave a comment.

Forgot your password?

Subscribe to this article's comments: RSS (what’s this?)