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Return of the WaSP
No_Weak_Heart writes "After a brief hiatus, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has returned. Here's the story at Wired about this grassroots coalition which works to promote the adoption of web standards by authors, tool makers and in browsers. In a related vein, the Boston Globe has a comfy chat with Tim Berners-Lee, the guiding force behind many of those standards."
Your point is fine in theory, but you have to remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their default font size (let alone how to do it). Secondly, the default font size on most browsers looks plain ugly.
Uh-huh. I'm not the slightest convinced. These are people who say "follow standards and everybody will be happy". Making tradeoffs to cater to the default font size on IE undercuts their message.
-Rob
Government workers and contractors, you have to (or already have) comply with Section 508 Accessability Guidelines (as stated in the article), which means that most of these pages need to be rewritten anyway, now's a good chance to knock out XHTML1.0 compliance while you're at it, and shoot for the Web Content Accessability Guidelines (WCAG) too ... so all those neat Powerpoint presentations that are autogenerated into HTML need to go!
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Getting to level A is not hard at all, anyone hit AAA yet?, I'm finding XHTML1.1 and WCAG-AAA a little bit to unwieldy for everyday web use
That's the sacrifice we as web designers have to make. IE holds the lion's share of the browser market, and we can't expect MS to change the way it behaves in regards to web standards just to please you communist Moz users - it's an integrated part of their OS!!!
That's fine. I have my differences with this argument, but fine, whatever.
It is also, irrelevant. The original message is about an outfit promoting web standars. They are not promoting "code to IE". They are promoting standards. Given that, they should be coding to standards, not changing the way it behaves in regard to standards just to please you IE users.
We're not talking corporations or banks supporting customers here. We're talking a web standards advocacy group.
-Rob
The W3C designs recommendations. They are not a standards organization (such as ISO or ANSI).
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
For example, IE tries to guess what to do with a remote resource based on the contents of the file, rather than following the Content-Type header. Not only is this insane, as the server should be telling the browser what kind of file it is serving, not vice versa, but it has caused serious problems when trying to actually make IE treat a file with a particular content type differently. Want IE to download the file rather than display it? Well, unless you want to create stupid workarounds which break other browsers, you may have a hard time with this.
What WaSP should be pushing, and what I feel is one of the important parts of a web standard, is that a browser's behavior is as predictable as possible. When the browser tries to guess everything itself, rather than doing what the code actually says, it causes situations such as the one above. Sure, let the browser correct simple errors, but today's browsers are too "sloppy" when it comes to sloppy code. They should be more strict and unforgiving. This would make things a lot easier for web designers, as the browser would show clearly when there are errors in the code.
I generally find that it is a lot easier to "design for" (bad way to do it, but still) browsers that allow less sloppy code. Opera is excellent to check your code with, as it is even more unforgiving than Mozilla. Although this can lead to more "broken sites" when browsing the web, I find it to be of tremendous help to keep my own pages written properly. Mozilla has strong standards support, and seems to sometimes handle pages better than both Opera and IE (since IE's implementation of various standards has serious flaws), but it allows too much garbage code.
Then again, we have to live in the real world, and with clueless Frontpage users out there, we should back WaSP and try to make both browsers and authoring tools behave better - for a more open and accessible web. Sadly, because of IE's sloppiness, we are currently trapped in web designer hell. And viewer hell if the browser isn't "MSIE compliant".
Clever signature text goes here.
While I'm a very strong supporter of technical standards, I think efforts like this are naive wastes of time. The standards on the web are whatever MS decides they are, which is probably the best proof yet (if any more were needed) of why monopolies are bad.
On the contrary, this knowledge will merely make me whine and poke at Amaya too.
I work in a web agency, and have had real problems in the past with certain designers writing/editing pages that look fine in IE, but don't actually work in either browser (or, on occasion, display at all in Netscape). They then proclaim the page to be finished, never having checked it in Netscape (despite a contractual obligation to support it), leaving it for the rest of us to fix.
I would like to see a "debug mode" in all browsers, whereby any badly-formed HTML is clearly flagged as such. Then you could tell at a glance if there was a problem, and what it was.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I've got that page open in the second tab of Moz as I write this. It is liquid from any browser width down to 410 px. Below that, it degrades acceptably (remains readable) until the columns are just a single word wide, well below the limit of reason. All text responds to user-agent changes in the font size, and the layout reflows without problems. I've looked at their stylesheet and it looks good (wsp/css).
There is no may about it; this page does "abide by all the standards."
Does it also abide by the spirit of the standards?
Yes. The standards are not intended to lock you into any design style. There is no "best" design style. The standards were developed to assure that material written to the standard will be presented to the reader no matter what his user-agent (so long as the user-agent also recognizes the standards).
The standards have nothing to do about good design. All they address is across the board functional design. IMO, I think that on this page WaSP has sacrificed some quality of design to showcase what can be done within the standards. That is a reasonable design trade-off, and it has nothing to do with standards compliance.
In this instance, you need to realize that WaSP's core audience, the group they are hoping to influence, is not the average guy using his browser in the usual way. Their audience consists of web designers and others who are pretty sophisticated in their use of the browser, and are likely to have their browser window set at around 700px width, in a corner of their 1600x1200 screen.
According to WaSP, modern browsers are a necessity. The problem is, WaSP doesn't have the power the impose such a mandate, and my grandma uses whatever browser came bundled with her machine (how did IE win the browser war?)
IMHO, standards are great, but only if they are, in fact, standards. Thus, everything I write for the web follows the LCD (lowest common denominator) philosophy. Heck, I don't need tricks to put something that looks good on the screen (I'll do the alpha blending during graphics production, not at runtime). I don't like rewriting everything for a new browser (neither do the WaSP gurus), and that is why I'll stick to plain ole' minimal tag set HTML.
HTML is not the problem for me; the problem in getting a site to work properly on any browser comes in when you try to use JavaScript. An standard object model for *JavaScript* is what I really need, and that is just not a reality yet.
Some have pointed out IE's tolerance for mistakes is a problem, and I couldn't agree more. As a development browser, IE is a big mistake, unless you don't care about users of other browsers at all. Thank goodness for Mozilla.
how the heck would you set up your layout without tables?
Cascading Style Sheets. HTML was meant to represent the structure of the content, not its presentation. Style Sheets are the suggestions of layout and style.
I also don't understand how they can claim that web designers should design a single page that can be used both on desktops and handhelds. OK, maybe if it's just plain text that would work. But any more complicated layout is going to have to be redesigned completely for a handheld.
That's because you are stuck in the mindset that layout is done in the HTML. By moving layout suggestions to the stylesheet, there's a clear seperation between the content and the layout/presentation. That means the same content can be displayed on both devices, the browser making full use of the style-sheet, while the PDA uses a minimal or no stylesheet at all. The HTML just encapsulates the structure of the content (in that _this_ is a heading, _that_ is a paragraph), while the style sheet describes how to display it (headings should be bold, red and s_so_ big).
By a clear separation, accessibility to an HTML page is increased.