The Stuart Davis Show – Episode 12 – A Foothill in the Mouth from integral ecology on Vimeo.

The author states that many designers hold the mistaken belief that web standards are somehow hostile to the needs of good design. While this hasn’t been my experience in the 3 years since I began the crazy road that is web design I can see that if someone were use to a particular style of development one could get “stuck in a rut”. It happens to us all from time to time. While standards do effect design they should be thought of as separate. Standards are the structure that hold up your designs.

The F word

I have to say something about this section dealing with flash. I completely agree with the author. In capable hands flash is a wonderful delivery for elements of your pages that are not possible with HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. But, what about the other 90% of web design? Flash is simply not appropriat for most content  or commerce sites where search engine/blind user readability is important.

This chapter discusses the double cost of non standards design and the basics of design and building with them. Rather than manipulate HTML to address your content layout needs we should be developing the structure, presentation, and behaviors of our websites separately. Structure being the text data. Presentation being design of typography, color, placement… And behavior addressing function and effects. Using this method takes less time to create and much less time to change in the future.

By using standards our sites can degrade nicely in non compliant browsers. Even if our fancy smancy  javascript menu doesn’t display the user will still have usable navigation. And yes portable browser with no css support at all can still display the structure of your XHTML and enable the user to navigate your site.

At this time there are two approaches to this, strict compatibility and transitional compatibility. With a transitional approach one would still use a dash of outdated methods like tables (yes I said tables but rest assured I won’t use any on your site). With strict compliance we completely separate structure from presentation and behavior. Using valid XHTML and CSS as well as DOM based scripting for behavior.

Until web standards came along we were all happily coding along our differing versions for backwards compatibility. Wait a minute… did I say backward? Yes, constantly chasing old technology to include those users who had not updated their browser software. Writing Javascript vs. ActiveX inline styles vs. CSS sheets even DHTML vs. DHTML (yes dynamic HTML was different for different browsers) Bloated web coding has cost clients billions collectively in over used bandwidth and has excluded up to 25% of possible customers. So what’s the cure?

“Write once, publish everywhere,” or follow web standards. This forward compatible thinking will continue to include more and more potential viewers for our sites through the use of XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and DOM. The WC3 has set a very attainable (accessible) future with the Web Standards Project. Savings in time to create and maintain sites and bandwidth alone are worth it.

Part One

Introduction and before you begin.

I have just finished reading the books preface including information about the author and editors, the Intro and before you begin section. If you are not an internet developer or designer these pages are a nice introduction as to why design and development for the web can be so challenging and time consuming but, for  my purposes they are really just an introduction to the author, his writing style and the book. Now on to chapter one.