Sadly, Some Designers Still Don’t Get it
The web standards battle continues.
After all the known benefits that standards based design can bring to the table some people still refuse to acknowledge them. I came across an article written by Salvatore Iovene, a programmer from Naples, which was written in response to another post by Stuart Brown. Salvatore brings some good arguments to the table about why the owner, as well as the designer, of a web site should care about standards based design.
On the other hand, Stuart maintains that web standards don’t matter (that much). He points out that web pages are all about the end-user (I agree), that they should be accessible to as many people as possible (I agree), and that end-users don’t care about what goes on under the hood as long as the site works (Hold up! They will care when they upgrade their old browser and the site breaks).
My two cents..
I would like to add one key argument here that Salvatore didn’t mention, but ironically Stuart did.
“One might consider future upgrades and developments in the web over the coming years, some of which may break badly constructed code, but in all honesty problems such as these are seldom, and it may be many years before problems develop - but you’ve plenty of time in between to update markup should a problem arise.”
Unfortunately, those problems are not many years away. They are happening right now. Internet Explorer’s newest version is better at displaying standards based markup than previous versions. It also displays “bad code” as it is supposed to be displayed…badly. Thus breaking a few non-standard design techniques. Specifically, I can think of three old-school, non-standard coding practices that tend to fail in IE 7.
- IE 6 has a mode known as “Quirks Mode” specifically to display “quirky” code. It was triggered differently than IE 7’s “Quirks Mode” thus opening up the possibility of broken sites.
- Non-standard CSS or “CSS hacks” were used to fool certain browsers (mostly Internet Explorer) into ignoring or using specific lines of CSS code. Suddenly, IE 7 can see these CSS hacks where IE 6 couldn’t. The result - a broken page.
- Sites that use conditional comments to feed a special CSS file to IE (full of CSS hacks) without specifying which version. IE 7 gets fed the same “bug fixes” that older IE browsers get even though it doesn’t need them. The result - you guessed it, a broken page.
These problems will only get worse as more of the internet population upgrades their browsers. All of today’s browsers are moving towards a standards based web and leaving behind support for old techniques. Maybe it’s time we designers (and site owners) did too.
