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.
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.
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 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?
@“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!”?
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Jonathan Lui
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…
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:
Search rankings are meaningless.
There is just one mandated web browser (typically IE6).
Zero to few sight disabled employees use them.
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?
@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?
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.
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.
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Iain Hosking
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…
I used to work as a designer for a large web company three years ago, they were 37 employees at that time so it did was large, and web standards were all the rage. One area of the company was in charge of giving technical and cultural copy material about the web and the whole development process; we were given in memos about the benefit of the web standards, good programming practice, web community phenomena, and other stuff.
A particularly interesting memo we had was about Firefox and his superiority over other browsers and why we should use it; as a matter of fact, we were practically obligated to use it as a reference for design, and for browsing both the Internet and our own VPN, because the browser itself and all its abilities and components made comunication a lot easier, a fact which I could not agree more.
As a result, all the employees started enjoying Firefox; I remember a young girl next to me using brand new components and pushing tab navigation to its limits with her endless necessity of web community needs.
After several months, I got bored and left the company. Nevertheless, I found that all this introduction to Firefox was a good approach to make people related to the web environment start to embrace web standards without having to actually be part of it.
Furthermore, there’s no easy way to reach the unbelievers. There is no “Your Average List: For People Who Hate Web Standards”? where they can conveniently be addressed en masse.
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Jay Myers
I work for a very large retailer (100,000+ employees) as a front-end developer. For the past couple of years, my small group has been playing the role of evangelists in the areas of SEO, accessibility, and standards. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a position of not being able to change much due to the enormous enterprise architecture our web site(s) sit on. It would seem to me that smaller firms would be more flexible in their back-end architecture, having the ability to change things for the benefit of standards, without having to make a case to non-savvy senior leadership, have them pony up a fat check to our technology “partners” for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, and kick off a huge multi-year project where a hundred different uninformed business groups want to have it “their way”.
I believe the only way things will change for large companies is for people in the know to educate those who aren’t in the reasons why standards are important—why this stuff matters, why it is ultimately good for the customer and for the bottom line.
When it comes to web development, Belgium is a little fish. No real bigmegasuper companies around here. Medium size is big around here. I work for such a ‘big’ Belgium company. Like most companies in this country they discovered the importance of web standards – css – accessibility – usability too late.
I was hired to close some gaps.
It is so simple and for me the discussion is closed: web development needs to be web standard. Always and everywhere. And web standards for me is the whole package: CSS, semantics, and accessibility. A big client wanted just to get a conformance label for accessibility. (a competitor had it also…) I told them to get rid of the 33 useless tables (only for the header and footer!) and try to get the site web standard first. Accessibility will come much easier. They agreed. The semantic part is always a bit harder to realize with CMS and the ability for publishers to copy and paste pure MS Word junk without thinking twice. But with well written style sheets and the very necessary style guides for publishers I have seen completely demotivated publishers turn into active contributers.
I demonstrated the power of Firefox and its very usefull plugins to the developers with whom I will have to work. So convincing. Every honest developer or designer knows that standards are the way to go. It is simply better code! And the tools are here, the convincing articles are everywhere, the benefits are so cristal clear. It is so funny that some people still try to argue. Just face the reality: good-old full table design was only acceptable in the nineties! Think and move forward.
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Den Bosch
People keep talking about standards as if they are time-consuming or difficult, as if companies need to be persuaded to adopt them in spite of the ‘difficulties’. I don’t get it—I find it much easier to develop a project when I’m using standards; everything just seems to organise itself.
If you do everything in HTML and CSS, more or less separating style from content, and then write a couple of fixes for IE, and some JavaScript for a bit of progressive enhancement, you cover every base in one go: normal web browsers, browsers without JavaScript, cell phones, screen readers… everything. And it also tends to make things better with search engine rankings; only the important stuff is in your HTML, which is the bit the spiders want. I can’t imagine the hassle of trying to get a website working in such a cross-compatible, SE-optimised way without using web standards: everything would suddenly require effort, rather than just falling into place.
It’s just like sticking to a naming convention for all your functions and variables: if you don’t have a convention, you end up losing track of things. I almost never forget what I called a function, because I can ‘work out’ what I must have called it based on my convention, so I don’t have to open a library file and check. I think little things like that add up to a lot when you’re programming all day.
Non-compliance would be so counter-productive for me, and I’m a solo developer—I can’t imagine how a team of developers make decent progress without web standards. I haven’t encountered any of these people discussed in the article—people who ‘reject’ web standards. Who are they? Are they just odd little people who dislike society, and themselves? I’m intrigued.
Surely the increase in productivity is why big companies should be interested in standards? It’s not an ideological thing; for me, the accessibility benefits are just a welcome side effect. The point is that it keeps your work organised and extensible, making it infinitely easier to edit things later, so you get more done in less time. That prospect must be of interest to big companies? OK, you have to learn the theory first, which takes a little while, but that’s true of any skill.
Or am I the only one who finds standards compliance much easier than non-compliance?
With very rare exception, the only time when using standards is harder than not using standards when you’re proposing that a company refactor a huge existing application or site. And that’s usually not such a good idea, anyhow, unless the benefits greatly outweigh the rewards. That’s why “I wrote”:http://www.alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#28 that we should abandon the zealotry and focus on what matters—writing excellent code and building new systems that succeed with standards.
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Everett Lindsay
Based on the author’s “Comments on Comments”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=2#16 I’m skeptical whether many businesses fit the narrow definition of a “large web company.” Counting the offsite staff, my gig has maybe 30 employees in all. And we focus on the production of web applications (which PPK may consider fundamentally different that just plain ol’ websites, I don’t know).
Assuming for the moment that I do fit this elusive demographic, let me say: I’m pretty sure I already explained why we (LWCs) don’t use standards, “months ago”:http://alistapart.com/comments/whereourstandardswentwrong?page=6#54 …
Because we use methodologies instead.
Although neither “Jonathan Lui”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#24 nor “Jay Myers”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=4#33 technically fit the demo (since neither work for LWCs), their paths to standards adoption are thwarted by the very same obstacle that plagues my LWC: we each already have a methodology in place. Jonathan’s pages are generated by a CRM. Jay’s pages are plugged in to an enterprise architecture. My pages are built on the fly with Fusebox. Even without standards, we’re guaranteed a predictable level of quality.
Assuming we heed “Isaac Schlueter’s”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#28 advice and just start making new pages better, then predictability goes out the window. I’ve done this before. In theory, there’s an abrupt switch from circa ‘97 tabular layouts to beautiful standardized code. In practice, after the switch, get ready for months of tweaking while your skills adjust to the new technique. Eventually, you’ll lock into a comfort zone and start enforcing your own unwritten rules. But in that interim, code is chaos. Your site becomes an evolutionary chart of shifting styles that only you can navigate. By giving up on a methodology and instead chasing standards, your company loses the quality of predictability. Contrary to the notion that standards are faster and easier, umpteen different flavors of standards on one site (however compliant) force everyone to program on a page-per-page basis, which slows things down.
In the paragraph above I paint an admittedly skewed scenario. Whenever Isaac abandons the old for the new, I bet he employs an unspoken methodology. Maybe he even goes so far as to write it down. Which simply points back to my message from months ago: standards aren’t the elephant in the room…methodologies are.
Whenever Isaac abandons the old for the new, I bet he employs an unspoken methodology. Maybe he even goes so far as to write it down. Which simply points back to my message from months ago: standards aren’t the elephant in the room”¦methodologies are.
Great points, Everett. A consistent methodology is an important part of creating quality software. (And yes, we do write it down.)
Production software is often not the time or place for testing out something that is unfamiliar. I believe that, in most cases, a team that is familiar with the standards-based approach can create higher quality software in less time than using web 1.0 methods. However, if you take a team of developers who have been using tables for the last 10 years, and say, “Use web standards!” then it’s usually a disaster. (I’ve seen it!)
You create software with the team you have. A whole new breed of webdev is entering the market these days, and they’ve never used anything but CSS for styling. The ones that are fresh and passionate about this field are using standards. As more and more devs use standards, more and more “LWCs” will as well.
That’s why the zealotry and the focus on refactoring old systems is absurd. Those systems will live as long as they can, and then be replaced by the competition. An inaccessible website is a bigger liability every day, and execs are learning this.
If you want to create a new app or site using a standards based approach, then you either need to educate the team you have, or get a new one. The ramp-up time from CSS n00b to expert is about a year for a bright and committed developer. That’s less than, say, C++, but it’s still fairly expensive, and it’s silly to expect that someone can just learn it overnight. As more and more customers and employers expect these skills, the webdevs of last century will either educate themselves or get into another line of work. It’s already happening; a standards-savvy developer with a year of experience and a personal blog site is a valuable sought-after commodity.
In other words, I think we can all calm down. The standards revolution has hit critical mass, and will continue whether we shout about it or not. There are more important things to talk about, like figuring out methodologies to create maintainable systems. (Hint: standards alone doesn’t do it!)
Only web developers who care about web accessibility talk about it, write about it, and read about it. The rest of the world doesn’t even know what it is. Could the same strategy discussed here could work for increasing awareness of the importance of web accessibility?
I have to say that from my personal stand point. There are only two ways to impose web-standards among the design world, particularly large companies. Before I rant any further I would like to point out the obvious. In a strictly programmed environment (c, python etc) the program does not compile unless the code has been symantically and logistically tested and found to pass. This is a strict system, but it does assure that all programs coded in that particular language are, at least, adequate.
Say for example the same principle was applied to a segment of HTML code. It wouldn’t work if the site did not conform to w3c standards. Even if the site was poorly designed (horribly large gifs, mismatching borders etc) it would still conform to w3c standards. This is my first proposal: Target the companies that provide web-editting programs & web-servers. Imagine if apache threw out an error if a tag wasn’t closed. It would be an amazing incentive to get neat (code-wise at least).
My second proposal would be the comsumer. Every standardista needs to put a tag at the bottom of every site they code:
“This site conforms to w3c standards, link->read more about the movement <-link” this would make sure that clients always become associated with having a w3c compliant site. Call it a stamp of pride. Remember that even the largest of businesses are ruled by their clients. With greater client knowledge comes greater pressure upon bigger companies to clean up their act.
43 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleLaura Keen
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.
Stan Slaughter
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?
John Lascurettes
@“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!”?
Jonathan Lui
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…
Stan Slaughter
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:
Search rankings are meaningless.
There is just one mandated web browser (typically IE6).
Zero to few sight disabled employees use them.
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?
Matt Newboult
@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:
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.
If you’re talking about displaying data in tables – why is this a problem? That’s what html tables are for aren’t they?
Jerrol Krause
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.
Isaac Schlueter
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.
John Lascurettes
“Isaac”:http://www.alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#28 ,
Great pointMany great points! Thank you.
Iain Hosking
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…
Esteban Lussich
I used to work as a designer for a large web company three years ago, they were 37 employees at that time so it did was large, and web standards were all the rage. One area of the company was in charge of giving technical and cultural copy material about the web and the whole development process; we were given in memos about the benefit of the web standards, good programming practice, web community phenomena, and other stuff.
A particularly interesting memo we had was about Firefox and his superiority over other browsers and why we should use it; as a matter of fact, we were practically obligated to use it as a reference for design, and for browsing both the Internet and our own VPN, because the browser itself and all its abilities and components made comunication a lot easier, a fact which I could not agree more.
As a result, all the employees started enjoying Firefox; I remember a young girl next to me using brand new components and pushing tab navigation to its limits with her endless necessity of web community needs.
After several months, I got bored and left the company. Nevertheless, I found that all this introduction to Firefox was a good approach to make people related to the web environment start to embrace web standards without having to actually be part of it.
James Reggio
Excellent observation, humorous delivery. Bravo.
Jay Myers
I work for a very large retailer (100,000+ employees) as a front-end developer. For the past couple of years, my small group has been playing the role of evangelists in the areas of SEO, accessibility, and standards. Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a position of not being able to change much due to the enormous enterprise architecture our web site(s) sit on. It would seem to me that smaller firms would be more flexible in their back-end architecture, having the ability to change things for the benefit of standards, without having to make a case to non-savvy senior leadership, have them pony up a fat check to our technology “partners” for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, and kick off a huge multi-year project where a hundred different uninformed business groups want to have it “their way”.
I believe the only way things will change for large companies is for people in the know to educate those who aren’t in the reasons why standards are important—why this stuff matters, why it is ultimately good for the customer and for the bottom line.
Hans Verhaegen
When it comes to web development, Belgium is a little fish. No real bigmegasuper companies around here. Medium size is big around here. I work for such a ‘big’ Belgium company. Like most companies in this country they discovered the importance of web standards – css – accessibility – usability too late.
I was hired to close some gaps.
It is so simple and for me the discussion is closed: web development needs to be web standard. Always and everywhere. And web standards for me is the whole package: CSS, semantics, and accessibility. A big client wanted just to get a conformance label for accessibility. (a competitor had it also…) I told them to get rid of the 33 useless tables (only for the header and footer!) and try to get the site web standard first. Accessibility will come much easier. They agreed. The semantic part is always a bit harder to realize with CMS and the ability for publishers to copy and paste pure MS Word junk without thinking twice. But with well written style sheets and the very necessary style guides for publishers I have seen completely demotivated publishers turn into active contributers.
I demonstrated the power of Firefox and its very usefull plugins to the developers with whom I will have to work. So convincing. Every honest developer or designer knows that standards are the way to go. It is simply better code! And the tools are here, the convincing articles are everywhere, the benefits are so cristal clear. It is so funny that some people still try to argue. Just face the reality: good-old full table design was only acceptable in the nineties! Think and move forward.
Den Bosch
People keep talking about standards as if they are time-consuming or difficult, as if companies need to be persuaded to adopt them in spite of the ‘difficulties’. I don’t get it—I find it much easier to develop a project when I’m using standards; everything just seems to organise itself.
If you do everything in HTML and CSS, more or less separating style from content, and then write a couple of fixes for IE, and some JavaScript for a bit of progressive enhancement, you cover every base in one go: normal web browsers, browsers without JavaScript, cell phones, screen readers… everything. And it also tends to make things better with search engine rankings; only the important stuff is in your HTML, which is the bit the spiders want. I can’t imagine the hassle of trying to get a website working in such a cross-compatible, SE-optimised way without using web standards: everything would suddenly require effort, rather than just falling into place.
It’s just like sticking to a naming convention for all your functions and variables: if you don’t have a convention, you end up losing track of things. I almost never forget what I called a function, because I can ‘work out’ what I must have called it based on my convention, so I don’t have to open a library file and check. I think little things like that add up to a lot when you’re programming all day.
Non-compliance would be so counter-productive for me, and I’m a solo developer—I can’t imagine how a team of developers make decent progress without web standards. I haven’t encountered any of these people discussed in the article—people who ‘reject’ web standards. Who are they? Are they just odd little people who dislike society, and themselves? I’m intrigued.
Surely the increase in productivity is why big companies should be interested in standards? It’s not an ideological thing; for me, the accessibility benefits are just a welcome side effect. The point is that it keeps your work organised and extensible, making it infinitely easier to edit things later, so you get more done in less time. That prospect must be of interest to big companies? OK, you have to learn the theory first, which takes a little while, but that’s true of any skill.
Or am I the only one who finds standards compliance much easier than non-compliance?
Isaac Schlueter
Exactly, Den.
With very rare exception, the only time when using standards is harder than not using standards when you’re proposing that a company refactor a huge existing application or site. And that’s usually not such a good idea, anyhow, unless the benefits greatly outweigh the rewards. That’s why “I wrote”:http://www.alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#28 that we should abandon the zealotry and focus on what matters—writing excellent code and building new systems that succeed with standards.
Website Design India
Web standards are required for developing websites.
Everett Lindsay
Based on the author’s “Comments on Comments”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=2#16 I’m skeptical whether many businesses fit the narrow definition of a “large web company.” Counting the offsite staff, my gig has maybe 30 employees in all. And we focus on the production of web applications (which PPK may consider fundamentally different that just plain ol’ websites, I don’t know).
Assuming for the moment that I do fit this elusive demographic, let me say: I’m pretty sure I already explained why we (LWCs) don’t use standards, “months ago”:http://alistapart.com/comments/whereourstandardswentwrong?page=6#54 …
Because we use methodologies instead.
Although neither “Jonathan Lui”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#24 nor “Jay Myers”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=4#33 technically fit the demo (since neither work for LWCs), their paths to standards adoption are thwarted by the very same obstacle that plagues my LWC: we each already have a methodology in place. Jonathan’s pages are generated by a CRM. Jay’s pages are plugged in to an enterprise architecture. My pages are built on the fly with Fusebox. Even without standards, we’re guaranteed a predictable level of quality.
Assuming we heed “Isaac Schlueter’s”:http://alistapart.com/comments/standardsandcompanies?page=3#28 advice and just start making new pages better, then predictability goes out the window. I’ve done this before. In theory, there’s an abrupt switch from circa ‘97 tabular layouts to beautiful standardized code. In practice, after the switch, get ready for months of tweaking while your skills adjust to the new technique. Eventually, you’ll lock into a comfort zone and start enforcing your own unwritten rules. But in that interim, code is chaos. Your site becomes an evolutionary chart of shifting styles that only you can navigate. By giving up on a methodology and instead chasing standards, your company loses the quality of predictability. Contrary to the notion that standards are faster and easier, umpteen different flavors of standards on one site (however compliant) force everyone to program on a page-per-page basis, which slows things down.
In the paragraph above I paint an admittedly skewed scenario. Whenever Isaac abandons the old for the new, I bet he employs an unspoken methodology. Maybe he even goes so far as to write it down. Which simply points back to my message from months ago: standards aren’t the elephant in the room…methodologies are.
Isaac Schlueter
Great points, Everett. A consistent methodology is an important part of creating quality software. (And yes, we do write it down.)
Production software is often not the time or place for testing out something that is unfamiliar. I believe that, in most cases, a team that is familiar with the standards-based approach can create higher quality software in less time than using web 1.0 methods. However, if you take a team of developers who have been using tables for the last 10 years, and say, “Use web standards!” then it’s usually a disaster. (I’ve seen it!)
You create software with the team you have. A whole new breed of webdev is entering the market these days, and they’ve never used anything but CSS for styling. The ones that are fresh and passionate about this field are using standards. As more and more devs use standards, more and more “LWCs” will as well.
That’s why the zealotry and the focus on refactoring old systems is absurd. Those systems will live as long as they can, and then be replaced by the competition. An inaccessible website is a bigger liability every day, and execs are learning this.
If you want to create a new app or site using a standards based approach, then you either need to educate the team you have, or get a new one. The ramp-up time from CSS n00b to expert is about a year for a bright and committed developer. That’s less than, say, C++, but it’s still fairly expensive, and it’s silly to expect that someone can just learn it overnight. As more and more customers and employers expect these skills, the webdevs of last century will either educate themselves or get into another line of work. It’s already happening; a standards-savvy developer with a year of experience and a personal blog site is a valuable sought-after commodity.
In other words, I think we can all calm down. The standards revolution has hit critical mass, and will continue whether we shout about it or not. There are more important things to talk about, like figuring out methodologies to create maintainable systems. (Hint: standards alone doesn’t do it!)
Sander Aarts
‘WebStanz’ or ‘Stanzy’ perhaps, to keep it slightly recognizable…
“Is your website Stanzy?”
Patty Bradley-Diehl
Only web developers who care about web accessibility talk about it, write about it, and read about it. The rest of the world doesn’t even know what it is. Could the same strategy discussed here could work for increasing awareness of the importance of web accessibility?
lasse manson
I have to say that from my personal stand point. There are only two ways to impose web-standards among the design world, particularly large companies. Before I rant any further I would like to point out the obvious. In a strictly programmed environment (c, python etc) the program does not compile unless the code has been symantically and logistically tested and found to pass. This is a strict system, but it does assure that all programs coded in that particular language are, at least, adequate.
Say for example the same principle was applied to a segment of HTML code. It wouldn’t work if the site did not conform to w3c standards. Even if the site was poorly designed (horribly large gifs, mismatching borders etc) it would still conform to w3c standards. This is my first proposal: Target the companies that provide web-editting programs & web-servers. Imagine if apache threw out an error if a tag wasn’t closed. It would be an amazing incentive to get neat (code-wise at least).
My second proposal would be the comsumer. Every standardista needs to put a tag at the bottom of every site they code:
“This site conforms to w3c standards, link->read more about the movement <-link” this would make sure that clients always become associated with having a w3c compliant site. Call it a stamp of pride. Remember that even the largest of businesses are ruled by their clients. With greater client knowledge comes greater pressure upon bigger companies to clean up their act.
Pat Williams
Your site is very interesting.