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why the standards exist

hope on the horizon

While we can't exactly turn back the clock, we can, fortunately undo some of the damage by empahasizing redesign work (fixing old Sites) and by teaching the new techniques to young designers. Designers need to accept part of the responsibility for browser display problems. Unless "we" report the bugs, the bugs will not get fixed.

Because most folks are resistant to change, it may be necessary to dispel some of the myths and convince our clients that "tag soup HTML" is not The Way... XHTML + CSS is.

XHTML is like the emptiness of a vessel; and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fulness... How deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the Honored Ancestor of all things!

Well, it is the most cost effective way to design Websites. If that doesn't sell them on it, nothing else will.

dispelling the myths

myth # 1:  Standards compliant Sites are ugly and boring

Ok, some of them are. But they don't have to be! All it takes is a bit of imagination. Using div tags, lists, paragraphs and headings, the visual appearance of any table-based Site can be reproduced without any apparent difference... and with only half the markup. CSS gives you more flexibility than tables. Take overlapping layers, for example. Thanks to the W3 DOM, it's possible to make image rollovers and dynamic text without javascript.

myth # 2:  CSS layouts don't work in old browsers

How old are we talking? Table-based layouts don't work in Netscape 2 or Mosaic. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Pure CSS layouts do. Tables can also cause problems for text-reading software blind people use to access the Net. Fixed widths mean horizontal scrolling on low screen resolutions. Plus, if everything sits inside a table, the entire table must load before anything appears on the screen. According to recent polls, the average user will wait eight seconds before hitting the "Back" button. Remember, not everyone has High Speed Internet.

The beauty of a CSS layout is, sections of the page are downloaded progressively—in the order in which they appear in the source code. This gives the viewer something to look at while the rest of the page is loading. With absolute positioning, a navigation menu can be placed anywhere in the source code (mimicking the appearance of most table-based Sites—menu in the first column, left-hand side of the page), yet it can be made to load after the main content. Doing it this way will greatly help users who tab through links with their keyboard. An added bonus is, you do not have to use tabindex (which breaks in some browsers anyway!) or the recommended "Skip Navigation" link. Less work for you as a designer.

If a browser does not support CSS (or only partially supports it), it will display the page's sections in a linear format, according to how they've been arranged in the HTML. Assuming the page has been properly constructed, everything will make perfect sense. Whole style sheets (or just the fancy stuff) can be hidden from browsers that mess things up.

myth # 3:  Flash Sites are expensive so they must be better

Flash Sites are inaccessible to a large number of users, and not just handicapped users. Think of how much business you may have lost because visitors were unable to access your Site. Government Websites in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. (other countries as well) must be accessible. These laws extend, to some degree, to the Private Sector now. So if your Website offers a public service of any kind, do not use Flash.

the 'X' stands for extensible

Whether you are a designer or a developer, or you're looking for someone to build a Site for you, it's important to think ahead. Will your pages be accessible to future technologies meant for browsing the Web, say, ten or twenty years from now? If you're writing them in XHTML, the answer is "yes". [End of article]

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