Blogodak - srpski blogovi na jednom mestu

The standards and the practice

As many of you reading this know there are a couple of ways to go about designing a Web site. The two of those of interest to this article are:

• The “old” way: Most commonly described with using tables for layout, not caring about document’s wellformedness, semantics are nowhere near in sight.
• The standards way: This is how things should be done – Cascading Style (is the) Shit. Every Web site conforming to Web standards has the three layers clearly separated—namely the information, presentation and behavior, the markup is used in favor of the content, not the other way around, meaning it is semantic and valid (well formed is possibly a better term here).

Now let’s just get one thing straight. I’m am an advocate of Web standards, but I am an even bigger advocate of making sense of things and understanding them in depth. I’m not saying support each and every proposition the W3C comes up with; I say take a look at them, and think about them, study them and make practice of what you think makes sense. Don’t spend hours trying to design a specific tableless layout just so it would be tableless. Think about what information you are presenting on the page, where does what belong, and how should you present it. If something is clearly tabular data (e.g. a comparison, or any other chart) you should use a table to present it with. Tables are not evil, they were just horribly misused in the past, there is no reason to shun them because of that.

People from back in the (table) day have all sorts of arguments about css not being able to do this, and css not being able to do that. The difference is in the approach.

Designing a Web site with well formed and semantic markup, and using css to present it on the user’s screen brings you so much more benefits than a table based layout ever could. It makes Web sites more agile, lighter, user friendly and the development of the Web site is taken on a whole new level. But remember this: not all of the css knowledge will help you if your pages markup is bad. Everything starts with the markup, if it is well planned and executed, you can go a long way with minimum of investments.

The conflict

I’m from Serbia, here the Web industry is just moving from zero; the table based scene is strong, not many standardistas here either, but I’m hoping that will soon change. One of the purposes of my blog in Serbian is advocating standards to the local crowd, and believe me, I’m doing my best.

What happens when a standardista is in a such environment that his skills are not recognized, his motivation to make the Web a better, more accessible place is laughed at, and his voice is simply shut out in project meetings? We must keep pushing it—that’s what needs to happen. More articles need to be published on topic of Web standards and best practices, the benefits of the standards compliance and semantic markup must be in front of peoples noses all the time. And not just any people – the right people must be made aware of this – the decision makers, the project managers, the big guys. Preaching standards to standards-aware crowd is like going to the same old boring concert over and over again. It eventually looses on it’s momentum, it’s volume and it’s flame, and you find yourself leaned to the bar sipping your beer not even paying attention anymore. So we desperately need to start making more people aware of our practices, that are superior to the ones still most commonly used. This is not avantgarde anymore – this is now.

The resolution

People need to get vocal on these matters, people need to spend more time educating other people instead of analyzing their code and complaining about improperly closed img elements (typos and fat fingers). Standardistas need to see the bigger picture, the Web won’t come to a halt because of these minor issues, what we need to concentrate on is delivering practical, real life examples of Web standards in practice – semantic and valid markup, css that brings benefit to both site owners and the users.

Make a blog, write about every site you make on which you are proud of every single tag, show it to your boss or client, strike a conversation at the meetings, point to the problems and then explain the solutions.

Let’s concentrate on saving our Web, the whales will be just fine.