a good point about web standards

... and i'm just wondering about your guys opinion.

http://www.airbag.ca/archives/002757.php



and along similar lines...

http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archives/more_important_than_web_standards.php

[QUOTE=supahsekzy]... and i'm just wondering about your guys opinion.

http://www.airbag.ca/archives/002757.php



and along similar lines...

http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archives/more_important_than_web_standards.php[/QUOTE]


Although I am an advocate of standardization, I have to agree with them. Sometimes, it's just not practical...But, on the road ahead...incorporating standards into your site (stylesheets, xml, xhtml) will be beneficial to any company with a web front. Why? Imagine this:

Corporation, we'll take a small business that sells...roughly 150 different products on their web storefront. Well, each of those products needs a description, so that's 150 pages, right there.

Next, they will need a shopping cart, some pages to configure a customer account (could be outsourced) as well as the typical contact information, customer service information and toss in a few pages for display of up-coming products and some space for a bargain bin. You could be talking about approximatly 25 more pages to maintain.

So, hypytheically, 175 pages. Now, your site is devoid of standards...you have [HTML][/HTML] tags among other depricated tags tossed all about...sure...all browsers still support them and that's fine because they work. But what happens when this company (as it happens quite often) undergoese an "image change"? Perhaps they change their logo, perhaps they want a new color scheme...perhaps they want a site that renders quicker or maybe they just want to revamp their current design.

Now the conversion basically becomes a regeneration of all 175 pages with the new look. If they are smart, they use something like fast-templates in php...but what if they don't? That means all of that content has to be copied, pasted and proof-read...something they are going to be charged hourly four. That cuts into their bottom line, and that's not what businesses like to hear.

Now, imagine that same site...standard compliant code, cascading stylesheets...xml even. Upgrading the site is going to be much simplier. Perhaps as little as changing a few files here and there.

Simple fact is...you dont have to be totally standard compliant...anyone that goes to a site and runs a validator on it just to see should be shot...customer's dont care about valid code...they care that they can find what they are looking for quicker than normal. But businesses care about their bottom line...which is going to be more effecient in the future? I'm willing to bet it will be sites that are at least incorporating some standard code into the designs of their sites.

You can still use CSS for text, colors, backgrounds, image replacement, etc. even if you are using a table to insure that your layout looks basically the same in NS4.7. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing like some advocates would have you believe. But it does seem like sometimes the whole point of web design gets lost in the latest articles on the newest CSS rollover technique.

One cause of this is that these technical tricks are easy to understand and re-use. You just copy paste the code out of an article, and you have the effect. It's a lot easier to do that than say, learn about usability, learn how to choose a good color scheme, learn how to train a client to market their site effectively, use good information architecture on a large web site, etc. Those things are all a little harder to understand than copy/pasting someone else's code, so they don't get talked about as much. Plus, less people know about those areas, so less people write about them.

Plus, it's just a phase. Web standards are close the saturation point in my opinion, and it will soon be second-nature to most pro designers, so we won't need to talk about it so strongly anymore. I would guess most of the people that are going to learn CSS, have already learned it. The ones that are left are the amateurs, or the ones too stubborn to change the way they develop web sites. And they will be left behind.

In my opinion a good designer must find the right balance when it come to web standard... its not always pratical and some time making a layout with nested table is the bst option.. as long as you dont go crazy with tons and tons of nested table... I have to say I think like Deker on this one...

Also when it coem to easy updates, you can also consider using Server side Inlcude for comon elements (likr the header and navigation system... Praticly all host (not including free ones) support them...

Also... you have to remember than not all Syandards are not supported by the most used broswer in the world Internet Explorer (like 90%)... so even if your site is consider as standard... it does not mean it will work...

The only question you have to ask are:
1)Does the page work?
2)Are updates and changes areasy to make

If you can answer these 2 by YES while your pages are not 100% standard... your fine

Finnaly... why should they be only one way to work?

I don't believe you should ever use nested tables, and I really don't believe you should ever use tables for layout at all. Only if your client insists on having the layout "work" on very old browsers perhaps, and one or two other reasons. But standards compliance is definitely something to strive for. There are work-arounds to the problems with IE, and good coding techniques will eliminate many of the problems with it.

The main problem with some of the articles on standards in the past few have been that when you read them they make it sound like as long as your site validates, it will get a ton of traffic, and it will be a great site. Now people are just trying to push back a little and remind people that there is a lot more to web sites than CSS and web standards. That doesn't mean CSS and web standards are any less important, it just means we shouldn't forget about all the other important aspects of a web site like usability, scannability, accessibility, and all those other "ility" words.

There are other posts on why the two posts mentioned in this article are wrong...

http://www.htmldog.com/ptg/archives/000049.php

Dave Shea even posted a clarification of his original post on the matter, which some people mis-understood: http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/15/tables_oh_th/

The bottom line is that you need to read all of these articles and decide what is best for the site you are currently working on. Sometimes we have to compromise and use less-than-ideal methods for a site to stay in budget or meet client demands, but standards-compliance should still be strived for whenever possible.