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Developing a Standards-Compliant Web App?
dogas queries: "I work for quite a large company that is creating quite a large web-based enterprise-level application. We've been in development for a long while, and currently our app is only native to IE 5.5. At this point it would take a *lot* of effort to bring our app up to to be Standards-compliant. Now management wants our app to be more flexible, such that if the customer wants to customize the look-and-feel, it won't be a major undertaking that will kill the structure. Naturally, we're switching to a CSS-based layout, ripping out the IE proprietary Javascript in favor of ECMAScript, and bringing the whole app to XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliance while we're at it. Since we started coding the front end at about the time of the browser wars, we didn't have the luxury of planning to use the W3 standards (especially since they were not complete, and browsers weren't honoring them anyways). I'm wondering what type of priority creating a standards-compliant web app is in other companies, and if that priority is being raised given the benefits of creating pages that separate structure from style from behavior."
Standards compliance is always a good thing. But dont for a moment think that it means crossbrowser/platform compatibility. Nothing beats actually testing your application on at least the most popular browsers on the most popular platforms. More often than not you will have to make comprimises in order to achieve compliance and compatibility at the same time.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
If this application is visible on a public website, making it standards-compliant is a major step towards making it accessible to the partially sighted, blind or motion-impaired. The company may also have staff that fall into this category. Making the site accessible in this way could even be a legal requirement (depending on your country) and it's just the right thing to do anyway.
What are you aiming for - compliance with the W3C specifications, or separation of content and presentation?
You can use all those nasty <font> elements and still adhere to the specifications. Use HTML 4.01 Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Transitional (following Appendix C).
The benefits of adherance to public standards means increased compatibility with present and future browsers, and reduced business risk.
Separation of content and presentation is slightly more risky, due to buggy browsers, particularly Internet Explorer. If you are going to do this, make sure you have somebody familiar with CSS first that knows the limitations of the various browsers.
You may want to do it in two stages - first separating out the minor styling, such as fonts and colours, and then getting rid of the table layouts when you've laid the groundwork.
Older browsers like Netscape 4.x will almost certainly cause you major problems. The normal technique these days is to hide stylesheets from them using their bugs against them. That way, they get the plain, unstyled HTML page (which should still be functional if you are doing things right).
Newer browsers have something called "doctype switching". Make sure you trigger standards-compliant mode so that they are at least trying to do the right thing.
Don't rush headlong into CSS if you've not spent much time with it before. There are plenty of things you can do to screw up a page (e.g. pt or px-sized fonts) that aren't immediately obvious to the newcomer.
Luckily, the things I'm working on are fairly new, so we'd need a pretty strong reason not to use the relevent specifications and separate content from presentation.
As much as I understand the underpinnings of that statement, You cant go around making comments like that. Only coding for mozilla /netscape is just as lazy and ignorant as the idiots that only code for IE. The trick is to build for compliance, have a nice clean design and test cross platform and cross browser as much as possible. Iron out the bugs and make comprimises (usually graphic design) where there are style problems you cant fix.(Degrade gracefully)
I will say though its about time people gave up on NS4.7 it is the browser from hell!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
In what tags is the 'baz'?
You mean "elements", not "tags".
unrecognized CSS tags will just go unnoticed
There's no such thing as a "tag" in CSS. Are you talking about rulesets?
The Zen Garden is an exercise in graphic design, and a rebuttal to the myth that standards-based code is ugly. Most of the entries are highly fragile, not very usable or accessible, and are NOT suitable to use as examples for production websites.
(emphasis mine - see bottom)
I defintiely agree with the parent here. Try to make sure it's viewable on as many browser/platform combinations as possible. Yes, maybe the newer ones will still look prettier, but as long as older browsers at least display the basics.
Testing under IE, NS/Moz (multiple platforms), Opera (if possible, and even Lynx means you can see which ones display it as you want, which fail but still display the text, and which bomb out totally (see bottom).
If using CSS, testing how it looks when you eliminate the stylesheet is always a good idea. In fact, designing the layout before even adding the Styles means you know that it's at least legible in "plain" format (the "KISS"/"Get it Right in Black & White" methods)
Oh and personal peeve. Never hardcode your font-sizes and the absolute width of your pages. There's nothing worse than a page which takes up about half of your 1280x1024 screen and displays in a tiny little 10pt font.
Yes some browsers cab nabdate a minumum font-size, but too many sites also implicitly state sizes of tables and positionsing - and therefore readable font0sizes start to ovelap badly.
Oh yes. I gave up on Netcape 4.x on my site a couple years ago. Not only did it not display my styles properly, but it couldn't even fail cleanly.
TiggsEven Lynx would show a style-free version of my pages, whereas NS4.x actually lost half the text.
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
Web standards are important from just an interoperability standpoint.
When you're sure that everyone uses the same browser, it means you can use a 'standard' that works for you. But enterprises are increasingly called to support a wider range of hardware and software.
Using data standards is a key component to interoperability. The more universal the standard, the more likely the systems will interoperate. That applies to any enterprise and any system, from CD recording format, to Unicode, the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, to Webstandards, to the Incident Command System.
Heck, Law School's main purpose (besides removing your soul) is to teach you the standards and processes of working the legal system. For the most part, the Law is the system that ensures the interoperability of property (heh).
You can certainly roll your own standard, or stick to an old one, but you run the risk of not being interoperable. In a world of increasing interdependence, you will probably want to implement your own solution, but ensure that the "public" parts are interoperable.
My father is a blogger.
Separating content and presentation would be a good thing. But the currently supported web standards (HTML, XHTML, JavaScript, DOM, CSS) don't let you do it by themselves.
I'd have to disagree with that. Most of the standards movement for web design focuses on "semantic markup". Only headings, paragraphs, and the like should be included here. No fonts, colors, etc. This is your content. Yes it has tags, but when using XHTML 1.0 Strict it is also XML, meaning that an XSLT could be used to generate that content from some XML source on the server if necessary. Using CSS to do placement & styling of elements is very feasible for 95+% of the market.
As others have mentioned, standards compliant != cross-platform. However, standards compliance is very much supported by the technologies you mentioned.
Additional reading:
A List Apart - lots of articles on integrating useage of standards-based web design
Jeffery Zeldman's Weblog - a big proponent of web standards
I'm the lead developer of a commercial web-based document management system. It has a huge PHP and javascript codebase and runs well on any modern browser (IE 5.5 and up, Mozilla 1.0 and up, Konqueror, Safari, etc). Here is the most valueable piece of advise that I can give you: Make the developers use Mozilla. Seriously, code that works on Mozilla is probably going to work on IE, but the reverse is not true. Using Mozilla will force standards compliance in the development cycle so that it won't have to be bolted on later. They're going to whine and bitch and moan, but make it happen. You'll save hundreds of thousands of dollars down the road.
Matthew
www.para-docs.com
/. finds me to be 20% Troll, 80% Funny