Three years ago I was a web designer who didn’t care about web standards. I was part of the first wave of Flash designers that eschewed everything coming from usability and accessibility people. Web standards as a concept didn’t even register. The only markup I regularly produced was that necessary to embed and center my SWF files. My sites always got enthusiastic reviews and I was amongst the vanguard of Flash people pushing back the borders of Flash and serverside/db integration moderating on two large Flash communites on that subject.
Then, about three years ago all that changed. A couple of friends started to educate me in web standards and why they were important, how usability didn’t have to be boring and how accessibility should be a given, not an add-on. Of course it helped that I already had the process side of design pretty settled, I already knew how to hand code markup and above all it helped that CSS was just beginning to come into its own as a force to be reckoned with.
Why am I telling you this?
Well, firstly of course its to say ‘thanks’ to everyone who ever wrote an article I ‘got’ or produced a design that made me gasp but thats pretty much a given.
What its mostly for is to illustrate to people like Tommy Olson that their efforts are appreciated. Tommy recently wrote about how true XHTML was dead:
I thought that with education and information, and by leading by some sort of example, we would be able to weed out the worst problems together. Today I have to admit that I was wrong. XHTML 1 is dead. Lost. Beyond all salvation.
I’m not going to get into a ‘real’ XHTML vs tag soup debate, the article from Tommy is just an example. There are a few articles lately where in my opinion some dangerous assumptions are being made and these seem to be leading the hardcore standards people like Tommy some frustration (NB: I’m not suggesting a link between these two links except in a cursory way). Recently John wrote as part of a larger article that:
the project I am about to start is kinda being watched over by another, bigger, web development company; who, in not so many words, told me they think web standards pretty much suck (politics, ya gotta love ’em).
I said to John in his comments that this was a depressingly common view amongst web dev companies of a certain size and I believe it is. There are still plenty (by which I mean the majority) of companies out there who are like I was three years ago – they have no interest in web standards.
So we need standards zealots. We need people who get irate over what MIME type we serve our content as just as three years ago we needed people who got irate over where we placed our Home page link or whether we used tables for layout or any of those other things we now take for granted.
But standards zealots? You need to give us time :o) As designers first and foremost it takes us awhile to get to where you are but that doesn’t mean we’re not learning and taking things on board. This site (almost) validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict but because I’m serving it as text/html its not ever going to be true XHTML and I appreciate the distinction and I appreciate why its important. My own CMS skills are not l33t enough yet to ensure that my visitors comments are valid XHTML strict so I can’t implement that yet but thanks to you guys I have learnt to write to that standard so that when I have raised my CMS writing/hacking skills I can do as you suggest.
Look at the example of me to see how well you are doing – one by one designers are getting there. Don’t give up on us yet, we really do need each other.
Left Brain Right Brain 
Tommy Olson was the first to alert me to the tag soup thing and I spent days researching what the hell he was talking about, he also took the time to answer my mail. People like Tommy and Ann are very important to our community and we should be grateful they do take the time to share.
With all that said I believe XHTML, even served up as tag soup is important too, it’s part of the Web Standards Brand Identity and helps sell in the idea of standards to people who may not be otherwise interested. No, we are not going to do tables and HTML we are going to (x)HTML and CSS, it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s the future, you’ll love it!
It/We will get there in the end but if web standards were a TV it would still be black and white, we’ll get colour eventually it’ll just take time.
Bad mark-up or not, I’m not ready to give up my X just yet… but please Tommy, Ann et al, don’t give what you do… we need someone telling us where we are going wrong if we are to correct it eventually.
Off topic: By the way Kev, this new design makes readability of your site much better than before… shame it’s tag soup! 😉
@John: Yeah, the old design was really more a ‘coming-to-terms’ process with WordPress hence I kept adding/ammending and it ended up unwieldy and top heavy and hence readability suffered. I’m much happier with the usability of this one.
lol@shame it’s tag soup ;o)
I’m just waiting for the first of the CSS zealots, who horsewhip anyone who dares to use floats for layout… (“They’re not designed to be used for layout, they’re for reflowing around inline images dammit! – you might as well be using tables…”)
Absolutely right Kev.
I often find myself saying this, but it is so important to have people arguing for extremes. We get some seriously right wing people, some seriously left wing people, and darn me if most of us don’t listen carefully to both arguments and then fall down in just about the right place: the carefully chosen balance.
It’s the way of the world.
I really love the redesign by the way. Nice stuff.
@Matthew – it’ll happen, no doubt and they’ll be *right* to say it ;o)
@Andrew – thanks re: design comments :o)
I often think that a lot of designers are scared to take the middle way you talk about for fear of being percieved as ‘middle-of-the-road’. Its the horror of horrors for designers – being percieved as staid. That in itself though is a worrying line to take. Design is, in my opinion, mostly about the communication of ideas, a perfect example being a blog. I see comments on “CSS Vault”:http://www.cssvault.com sometimes about how boringly bloglike a blog looks. Comments like that miss the point. Information design has led us to create certain general design solutions for certain types of website as thats how the ideas get communicated the best for that particular genre of site. Doesn’t mean the *aesthetic* design has to be staid or ‘middle-of-the-road’ though.
I agree with you about the aesthetic design, Kev. I guess I’m not saying that that should be ‘middle-of-the-road’, but more the technical aspects that create ‘the design’, which is what standards are.
For example. Purists would want us to serve XHTML as an XML application MIME type, and old school techies might say that you should stick to HTML 4 instead.
Most people come down in the middle and code in XHTML but serve with ‘text/html’ MIME type.
There are countless examples of this type of balance on the technical side of web design. Font sizing, image replacement, etc…
We try and make the best of both worlds and use a happy medium. It doesn’t mean the ‘design’ has to be conceived in the same manner.
I completely agree :o)