Web Standards Lie?

Quote from: davidm at Jul 15, 2006, 11:53 AM

Quote from: Starbuck at Jul 14, 2006, 09:19 PM

We just take a position before agreeing to do work for anyone - here’s how we do it, if you want something less then go somewhere else .. actually we don’t need to say that directly, it’s implied in whats included in the pricing.

That’s exactly what I do too...
But sometimes there are some outside influences which bring back the old debates...

Recently a CEO I had convinced of the advantages of standards had seen the website another CEO had showed him. Of course it was Flash all around, with animated menus, and a nice design overall. He came to me saying he had thought about it and the menu I had showed him was not as attractive as the one for his friend website... Now he wants an animated menu, never mind accessiblity, never mind page weight... I am looking into enhancing the full CSS dropdown I have built with AJAX but not sure I can accomplish this... (any idea BTW ?)

Quote from: davidm at Jul 13, 2006, 11:13 AM

Do you think there’s some loss of eye candy as a result of standards ? I wouldn’t agree or disagree with you I’m just interested in hearing your opinion on that. We have a designer who creates the most beautiful but ’hardest’ designs to code, but we never let standards prevent us from creating a perfectly marked up tableless rendering of the design - but we have struck certain client’s using ’other people’ to do the coding and had requests to remove such elements as rounded corner boxes from the design on the advice from their coders that they’re "impossible" to recreate in a web page - we usually laugh, and give em what they want .. but it’s interesting to watch how quick some people are to ’give up’ rather than spend a bit of time learning ’how’. So far, I haven’t found a design that was impossible to code .. I’d certainly love to see one though

I fully agree with you, I am not saying web standards compliant website are less sexy than non compliant ones... I also agree anything can be done as far as layouts are concerned (certainly even more stuff !). But the benefits of standards are not visible to the naked eye... of course you can show the benefits to someone, but they can’t really see it themselves...

You can show off your accessibility, free reports can be obtained here:-

http://www.contentquality.com/

Validation reports here

http://www.w3.org/

I’d be interested to see the menu your needing to replicate in css - you know your starting to get into serious bucks, something needing to be produced in Flash costs big - and so does reproducing a Flash element in css depending on the level of detail and animation that’s been used. There’s a certain amount of animation you can and can’t touch with css - but whats his friend got that he’s prepared to pay for is probably the first issue to address

Interesting discussion
One of the things that intrigues me is the mentioning of talking about web standards to clients. I adhere to standards and while I don’t go along with being called a zealot, I am very particular about validating xhtml and css, and coming as close as possible to meeting WCAG AAA (I never claim that even when I believe I’ve reached it, as so much is objective at that level).
I tell my clients that they will get a site that is cross-browser compatible and accessible to the widest possible number of users, but never, ever mention web standards. It has never occured to me to do so and I guess that’s because I tend to think of the standards as being guidelines for developers, not end users.

Recently, I have had to skin vBulletin. If any of you have had this unpleasant task, you will know that vB is chock full of nested tables. The default skin validates as xhtml 1.0 transitional only because it is served as html, not xml, and unless you want to get into hacking the core, you are stuck with a mess of nested tables. It is arguable whether a forum needs tables (and I feel that the forum body with poster information and content is tabular data) but most of the tables in vB are unnecessary and not compliant with web standards. However, not wanting to spend days on this skin, I had to work with the tables - and COULDN’T!! It has been so long since I used tables for layout that I had a heck of a time doing it.

I didn’t read the articles linked to in the first post. Basically, I don’t care whether there are people who are anti-standards or not. The web standards we currently have and the work W3C has underway towards device independence suit me very well. I understand the frustration some people have when they are not that familiar with the standards, or perhaps css, or browser quirks, but for people that are working with these things all the time coding to standards just becomes second nature. I don’t care what other developers do when they design a site and the more people who stick their heads in the sand and say standards don’t matter, the more work I am likely to get from clients who want sites that perform well across browsers and which are accessible