| What about standards? |
| Written by Kelsey | |
| Friday, 15 December 2006 | |
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I was initially going to write this as a small footnote, to be added to our portfolio explaining why not all of our past or present projects are standards-compliant. I realised that there was more here than a footnote, it's something I feel bears a little exploration. (Those of you not wanting the Clff Notes definition of standards and validation may want to hit 'read more' and skip to the end) So what are 'Web Standards'? The World Wide Web Consortium (also known as W3C) is an organisation that creates the rules that modern web browsers follow, for the most part. There's no legal obligation to follow these rules, but most companies who create web browsers try to get pretty close. These rules determine how browsers interpret the code that designers use to create websites. Not all browsers interpret the code the same way, so designers need to know how to build code that's robust enough to take into account the variances in the way that different browsers interpret code. There's also the issue of accessibility, how to build sites that take into account those viewers who may have difficulties viewing sites as intended - visually impaired viewers with screen readers, for example. In the last couple of years, the code standards that we work from have changed significantly and not all designers have had time to catch up. And frankly, I can understand why. We've been doing this since the late nineties, when creating a site meant dealing with table-based design - the equivalent of trying to paint-by-colours by filling in the cells of an Excel spreadsheet. Stylesheets, a method of defining visual properties that persisted throughout an entire site, were hit and miss at best. Over the past few years, there's been a focus on developing a body of standards that deals with separating the presentation of a document (how it looks) from the content (what it says). It means that once you've defined how a site will look, you can simply refer to that stylesheet on every page and all the content will be styled appropriately. Unfortunately, the learning curve is pretty steep. I personally only discovered the benefits of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in 2004 and it's only now, two years later, that I feel truly competent in their use. There's an enormous amount of basic knowledge that's needed just to deal with the techniques that must to be used to ensure visual consistency across different browsers. And then there's some things that should be simple, are simple under the old techniques, that are nearly impossible without resorting to complex hacks or additional coding - such as placing a footer at the bottom of a page or making an element centre vertically on the screen. To put all this in context, I quit my last job in May 2006 with nothing lined up. Just one of those 'had to get out' things. I started looking around and wound up being short-listed (top candidate in a field of one) for a management position in a respected and very funky web studio. In the final interview, I spoke a lot with the design director about web standards. He wanted to know if I was a css purist or if I was willing to work with what (as he termed it) was 'most efficient'. I gave him the answer he wanted, then turned the job down anyway. We had some cool stuff happening with thinksync and Webify and I felt it was time to take the jump. My point (and I do have one!) is that even among prestigious studios there's a perception that web standards take too much time. I've now gotten to the point where I know the tricks, hacks and basic necessities for robust cross-platform design and for me, css layout and standards-based design is by far the fastest and most flexible technique I've ever used. Which brings us back to the central question - what about thinksync and web standards? I'm gonna break it down into a mini FAQ of sorts. Except that the questions aren't frequent. At least not yet. Why don't all of our sites conform to web standards? A number of reasons:
It mostly is! We're using the Joomla! content management system plus some AJAX modules for that CMS which break compliance. Having said that, it still looks the same in every browser we care about, so it's only a little bit invalid, right? Bottom line We care about standards, we care about accessibility. We love using CSS layout and we always strive for cross-browser consistency. |
About thinksync
We're designers. We're not going to blather on about our design philosophy or methods (there'll be enough of that in the blog).We design websites, create beautiful printed work and build web applications.
It's what we do, what we love and we're here to help.
Current Projects
No Standing dot com - the blog of Rob Stevens.
Print Design
 Print projects coming soon!
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