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."

Comments

It's a Noble Aim

[icerunner]

Aiming for standards compliance is always a good thing, IMHO. However, you will find that you will have to make compromises along the way given that not all browsers comply with the standards to the same degree.

About 2 years ago I was involved in redeveloping our proprietary Web app to comply more with standards. It was a huge uphill battle to try and convince management that this was what they wanted. Complying to standards meant we had to drop or significantly change features of the app to ensure that it would work cross-browser and remain accessible.

My main advice is that whenever you ahve to make compromises on functionality and compliance, try and veer to the side of compliance. Your customers will (hopefully) thank you for it in the long run. Especially, if like me, they don't use IE or Netscape :-)

Re:Don't code for IE, but for mozilla/netscape

[cyb97]

I'd say opera is pretty crossplatform, too. Not as free as mozilla/netscape, but it's beginning to emerge as the true and only choice for smartphones and communicators/PDAs.

So I guess it's only a matter of time before IE-junkies realizes that it might be smart to check out their shit in browsers that doesn't make up their own standard as they go along

More reasons for standard/cross browser compliance

[okock]

Regarding web applications: I believe it's always good to support multiple browsers - even if you don't need to because you write applications for a closed user groups, that uses only a known browser.

As soon as you start to automatically test your web applications with scripts (e.g. HttpUnit) there is suddenly another browser: The test script. The more browsers you support from the beginning, the higher the chance that you can easily automate tests for your application.

Your mileage may vary with read-only sites, but others have already elaborated about this.

Re:Standards Compliance

[p3d0]

You're right, of course, but I think she was talking about web applications, where most people's browser doesn't support the standards. This problem is far worse with web apps than with Scheme, Java, or C++, although the latter did suffer severely with this problem a while back.