My ISP is NTL. My experience with them has been mixed to say the least. Its not been uncommon in the past to be on hold with NTL for over an hour to sort out a fairly routine issue. I also know of several people who have had horrendous issues with them – one acquaintance was undercharged by a penny for his phone bill and overcharged on his broadband bill by a penny and when he suggested one canceled out the other their system couldn’t deal with sorting it out!
However, I’m always minded to give credit where its due and I was surprised and pleased to see some fairly robust code under the hood of NTLWorld.co.uk. Now granted, it doesn’t validate and its far from semantic but whomever the design team who work on it are they’re obviously making a big effort to move things in the right direction and that to me is important. I mean, I could’ve blogged about how appallingly unsemantic the code is or bemoaned its inaccessibility but its always struck me that you catch more bees with honey than vinegar.
Or am I being unrealistic? Should we simply take it _as read_ that the bigger players should be making valid, usable, semantic, accessible websites? Should I be giving these guys a bollocking? After all, they do have a fairly large budget (one assumes) and are only constrained by internal deadlines (assuming the design team is in house of course), hell maybe we should all be complaining about the terrible state of the code?
But I think not. I think its right to see the glass as half full rather than half empty on occasions such as these so ‘well done’ NTL and your design team – don’t see this as the end though, see it as the first step towards a better site.
But what do you think? Commend or condemn?
Left Brain Right Brain 
bq Should we simply take it as read that the bigger players should be making valid, usable, semantic, accessible websites?
Most web sites are works in progress that evolve slowly, any that are evolving in the direction of improved standards compliance and accessibility should be applauded. So I think you have it right – except for the duplicate post 😉
Textile doesn’t work btw 😦
I just took a quick look, its not too shabby bit of a mess but I bet thats down to a really rubbish internal CMS. They get points for making a start but that’s its still only a start.
For such a cluttered home page, I think they’ve taken a huge step forward. By the look of it I was expecting to see atleast a few tables, so it was a pleasant surprise to see none.
Definitely a commendable effort.
I don’t know whats up with Textile H. It’s fine for stuff like embolding and italicising and links but anything more advanced than that and it screws up.
I might just need to update my plugin.
I’ve been really pleased lately to see more and more big brand sites (Yahoo/Microsoft/ESPN) taking the leap to a more forward thinking backend and I was wondering what we could do as a community to show these people that we appreciate the difficulties they face and the efforts thay’ve made but still encourage them to keep pushing their technology forward until its standardised, semantic, usable and accessible. Maybe a WSA/StyleGala type section to commend the ‘try-ers’?
Now this is what I like to see and its a breath of fresh air.
I’ve become a bit disillusioned recently by the amount of venom being thrown around the web standards community (only by some it has to be said, and never by the leading lights who always prove be open, honest and more than willing to give you a bit of their time – like Kev here – and more importantly constructive in any ‘criticism’).
Sites that are clearly beginning to wake up to the idea and are heading in the right direction – and even sites that are hailed as a great breakthrough in standards are being attacked for the odd stray ampersand. What the critics don’t seem to get is by attacking people for trying and not quite getting it right they’re making many more just not bother trying.
Give them a break – there’s a steep learning curve involved for some people here and as Tom says – quite often there are reasons its even harder to get it right first time (yes our CMS is a bitch as well!)
As the saying goes – if you’re going to fail, fail reaching because next time you may just get there and I only wish your attitude was a lot more common Kevin – a voice of reason as always.
Maybe a WSA/StyleGala type section to commend the ‘try-ers’?
Have you seen the flames on there for the “doers” let alone the try-ers! “See what I mean! (The latest flaming!) “:http://www.webstandardsawards.com/previous/vivabit.html
This is one of the places I mean where constructive criticism just seems to have been replaced by venom in a – that’s only there cos you’re mates with X etc kind of way!
bq. Maybe a WSA/StyleGala type section to commend the ‘try-ers’?
I think that’s what James Archer is trying to do with “The Weekly Standards”:http://weeklystandards.com/ .
I read that Martin. I can’t understand why anyone would think things like this are an ‘inside job’ and even if they do, why not jsut restrict comments to _constructive_ criticism. Poor John.
Prab – thats a good point.
Mr O got really badly slated and it just smacks completely of jealousy. The downside is that his words of wisdom, experience and bloody good tutorials have been lost to the standards community as a result. I know this wasn’t the only factor, but its got to have been a big part of it and I can’t blame him.
Like most of us I need people to point out what I’m doing wrong and why or I won’t know – and I’m never going to learn if its negativity all the way.
If people do 50 things wrong and 10 things right – praise them for the 10 and tell them how they could improve the other 50!
The other thing to keep in mind is – remember, behind the scenes there are a bunch of people trying to do a job, (and most times that bunch is made up of less people than you’d think) and they’re trying to do the best job they can given frustrating circumstances. Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks “I know, I’ll go to work today and do a shit job”.
Just because it’s a big organisation doesn’t mean that they think the website is important enough to give it a reasonable amount of resources to develop something new over and above the existing day to day maintenance, or send the web team on training courses to improve their skills so they can move away from the table based layouts that drive web standards people crazy (but work) to doing exactly the same thing with valid (x)html and css (because if it doesn’t look exactly the same, someone high up in another bit of the organisation will have a big blue hairy fit).
… and that’s not even getting into the troubles that some people have with content management systems, or bosses that don’t know/care about web standards and best practice.
So if they’re making steps in the right direction, commend them – it’s probably taken them a while, and the folk behind it are rightly proud of how far they’ve managed to get.
All that you’ll do by shouting at them is, at best, demoralise and demotivate them and at worst, put them off the idea of making the effort in the first place.
I’ve noticed the exact same thing with Telewests Blueyonder. I guess in their eyes, amongst the financial connotations and such they don’t need to go the whole hog as it’s not something Joe Public or Colin Client even consider or care about. I would say that all (three of) my clients so far, to whom I’ve explained the benefits of an accessible compliant website, don’t really give a damn and are more concerned that their site is at the top of the list on Google.
Martin, I saw that comment list on the WSA and couldn’t believe some of the comments which were just obvious cheap shots and far from constructive criticism. It was a shame there were so few positive comments, although I’m sure there were a majority who would agree Vivabit was a worthy winner. I liken it to having children, when they do something you think consider wrong, you give them a stern telling off, but when they do something good and commendable it’s either overlooked or just invokes a well done with no passion, no enthusiasm. Excluding my children of course, they’re super intelligent, considerate, never fight, loving, generous and quite clearly not really mine.
I think saying well done is the best answer.
Ive been trying to get mattian standards compliant for yonks (thanks in no small part to Kev and his DDN rants ;)) but Ive found more and more places are no longer helping, just moaning at you when you dont know how to go forward, even if you have made an effort (the previously mentioned DDN included now unfortunatly) In general the web is becomming a very nasty place to be at times, which is why Ive moved away from forums, and just read peoples blogs who I know are helpful.
Your an exception of course 😉