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Holier-than-thou standardites

Published on: February 22, 2006 by Paul Boag

A number of things have happened recently that have got me thinking about the state of web design. I find myself increasingly concerned about the mentality that is developing within certain parts of the industry.

I guess a recent interview I did for Dustin Diaz started me thinking. We found ourselves on the subject of whether I ever got sick of talking about good practice in web design (things like web standards, progressive enhancement etc.). I explained that this is where my real passion lies and that boagworld.com exists to communicate best practice in a way that isn't patronising or full of technbabble, which nobody understands.

The problem is that many of the "Standardites" have a holy-than-thou attitude

I have become increasingly concerned that there is a growing divide between those who have grasped this new methodology for designing websites and those who have not. The problem is that many of the "Standardites" have a holy-than-thou attitude, which can seem very condescending to those that aren't "in the know". In our desire to promote standards we have made those who are not yet using them, feel ignorant.

Not me too!

What has disturbed me most is that I have found myself doing the same thing. In my last podcast, I ranted about another web design show that promoted all kinds of bad practice. In next weeks show I moan about the "ignorance" of some designers when it comes to accessibility (following comments made on sitepoint.com about the target case). In both cases, I may have (and probably did) come across as very dogmatic and arrogant. This kind of approach only builds walls making it harder to educate and inform.

Take for example Andy Clarke's comments to accessify.com:

Those people still delivering nested table layout, spacer gifs or ignoring accessibility can no longer call themselves web professionals.

In the past, I have praised Andy for these comments and I still believe that they are in essence true. However, now I find myself wondering if comments like that actually help. If I wasn't using web standards and had not yet faced the challenges of accessibility, I would find those comments very demoralising.
There can be all kinds of reasons why people haven't adopted these new "best practices". Whether it is a lack of time and training, or simply that they find them too challenging, when in the past they have relied on a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver. Whatever the case we should be aiming to encourage and not condemn these people.

The web standards gang

There is a definite web standards community who all read the same blogs and go to the same conferences. When you are in this group it is hard to conceive that people have not yet grasped the concepts of standards and we are in serious danger of becoming increasingly insular.

My hope is that boagworld.com can bridge that gap and convince people about "web design good practice" without bashing them around the head with it.

Comments

Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email

Post by Volkher Hofmann on February 22, 2006 3:56 PM

My problem with all of this is that people in the know forget how darn difficult it can be to go cold turkey and try the new CSS/XHTML/accessibilty thing. I always thought that I had a good grasp on things and it soon turned out that the learning curve was incredibly steep and that, in fact, I didn't know squat about anything. In a way, I had missed the bus and needed to catch on.

Sure, I can get a site together that vaildates, but if you look beneath the hood, things do not conform to any of the many standards propagated around the Net. My coding is sloppy, etc.

There are a huge number of people out there that are trying hard but cannot muster the energy to really (!) get things right (right = the way people think it should really be done). To be honest, I constantly have a bad conscience about what I've put out there, and I don't think it should be like that.

What about the people blogging on the side, the people who have 18/24 jobs that don't leave them enough space to breathe, let alone time to really get into all the minute details and demands (!) of the standards movement?

If I read all the various CSS showcase sites, I often feel really bad for the people who have tried and then get trashed to the extreme for not going all the way, or for being unable to go all the way. That kind of attitude does not help in the least.

I do think that there is one thing missing on the Net: a central repository of column layouts, snippets you can use, etc. There are a ton of sites available that have parts of this, and more, but the dilligence needed to fathom all of it is beyond many people.

Just some thoughts.

Thanks for this post! I'm very interested in other people's take on things.
Post by Marston on February 22, 2006 7:15 PM

"If I read all the various CSS showcase sites, I often feel really bad for the people who have tried and then get trashed to the extreme for not going all the way, or for being unable to go all the way. That kind of attitude does not help in the least."

I agree with that and with most of the post. Its an interesting subject and situation which is going to need some sort of solution and understanding in the community as a whole if it is to be resolved or dealt with atleast.

When I switched to CSS/XHTML design from table/non-standard based I didn't find it hard at all because I saw the great benefits and I suppose "got it". But looking at the situation now, I definitely see how our good intentions can be misunderstood.

I guess it will just take a little more individual effort on the web standards community to explain things in an easier to understand and process manner.

Good points though.
Post by Jorge Pinon on February 22, 2006 9:35 PM

I suppose the underlying argument from the have-nots (for short) is that standards-based design is "better but not necessary".

Unfortunately for many of them, their full time jobs likely demand that they learn/implement the necessary stuff first (make that form work!) and worry about the standards when there's time. Which, of course, never really comes.

So good points, Paul.

But I refuse to defend, however, some of the troglodytes that posted on Sitepoint in defense of Target corp.
Post by patrick h. lauke on February 23, 2006 12:48 AM

of course, comments such as andy's need to be taken in context, as well as who they were targetted at (in this case, not the designers striving to work towards an understanding of web standards, but those who outright refuse to even aknowledge the fact that table based design, spacer gifs and generally inaccessible practices they learned back in the 90s are still the epitomy of web design).
Post by Cindy Lionwoman on February 23, 2006 1:57 AM

I agree with most of the comments written in this blog. I am one of 2 web developers for a website that brings in millions of dollars every year. I joined the group about 1 year ago and inherited a site that does what it needs to do, but really uses minimal CSS. Mostly just for font formatting.

About accessability, forget it. About even being 100% workable on Firefox, forget it. Not even sure about what surprises are there for Mac browser visitors. (75% of our visitors use IE, and with lack of time, we haven't been able to address our accessibility problems with other browsers yet). We'll eventually get there.

Anyways, as everyone knows, it's hard to get even the day-to-day work done, let alone learning AND implementing web standards and accessibility. Like someone mentioned, if your website works and is bringing in money, then web accessibility and web standards has to take a back seat to the day-to-day website maintenance. We work 10 hour days as it is, and my husband bugs me to get off the system on my off-hours as I am often on for hours after work trying to learn more advanced techniques.

That said... I think that if there were some templates that were pre-written and easy to cut and paste and make work, then more of us web developers would be able to delve into accessibility, advanced CSS and web standards.

Not too many people have time to read thick books, then actually test and implement the stuff we learn. We need shortcuts that are clear, to-the-point, and that work!

Anyways, thanks Paul for all your talks on accessibility and web standards. I think it gets us thinking, nevertheless. The first step for us is realizing that something is missing on our sites. The next step is doing some reading (or researching) on the subject.

Hopefully in a world of pressing new technology, we can still fit this subject in to the point that we actually can learn the specifics of how to make it work.

We could use some specific how-to's and templates that we could use to achieve some small wins and then graduate onto some bigger wins.
Post by Ben Bishop on February 23, 2006 4:24 PM

Paul you got a really good right about this article from Jason Guthrie on the 9 rules features blog. I thought you'd like to know and well done on a thought provoking article.

http://9rules.com/en/browse/featured/archive/72
Post by Charles Johnson on February 23, 2006 4:42 PM

I absolutely agree - I pop into the blogs of people like Andy Clarke and Molly from time to time and I always get this feeling of being spoken down to by them - a sort of sneering attitude at anyone who doesn't do what they do.

I get the strong feeling that their little world of endless web conferences and reading each others blogs has created quite an incestuous attitude. Maybe it would do them both good to get into the real business world from time to time, where other considerations apart from accessibility have to be taken into consideration, sadly!!
Post by Paul Boag on February 23, 2006 4:54 PM

Yeah Ben, I spotted that. Very nice to read!
Post by Paul Boag on February 23, 2006 5:25 PM

Hi Charles,
I think you need to be careful when it comes to pointing fingers at specific people. I know I mention Andy by name in my post but I did qualify myself by saying that I actually agree with his comment! Sometimes our reaction to people can be as much dictated by your own attitude as it can be the attitude of the person you are talking to. For example do you feel patronised by Molly and Andy because they are patronising in the way they write or is it that you have been left feeling like a second class coder by other people and so now feel like everybody is having a go! Does that make sense?

I guess part of the problem is that we all feel constantly judged because anybody can pop the hood of our sites and see how they are put together. I live in a constant state of fear that Jeremy Keith might be bored one day and look at my Javascript! Now Jeremy Keith is a great guy and wouldnt critisies me in a million years. The problem is that I know the code is crap and so put my feelings about it onto other people....

wow this is turning into an episode of Opera!
Post by Stuart on February 23, 2006 9:15 PM

Some good points you've made here. As standardistas we can't go round ramming our own views down everyone's throats. It's better to encourage people to see how to do things in a better way by example, and to not use standards as a stick to beat people with.

The kind of people that I feel don't help the standards community are those that go round adding negative comments, slating one technique or another. Fair enough we all have differing views and I'm personally all up for debate, but I do feel it's wrong to criticise if you can't be constructive and backup your views.

One thing we all need to be aware of is that none of us know everything and if you become an elitist, you are potentially shutting the door on your own learning.
Post by Brian on February 23, 2006 10:22 PM

I can see both sides of things. I run a small (2 employee) business and website development is one of the 3 major things that we do (videography and graphic design being the others).

Listening to Paul's podcast really got me thinking about web standards, XHTML & CSS, and the rest of it, and I made a decision. You see, I was getting ready to dive head first into PHP and try to wrap my head around it so that I could customize CMS code and develop small web apps for clients and the hardest part was getting PHP to generate the proper HTML, due to the fact that I was using table based design (with spacer gifs and the rest of it). For this reason using XHTML and CSS to serperate the content and the markup made perfect sense.

To make a long story short... I have started to make and trasnsition and it is worth it. I have only completed one site and I am working on another right now. Are they the best looking sites? Probably not.. Is it completely accesible? Probably not.. Am I proud that it is small, fast, and looks exactly the way the old site looked, and validates with ease? You better believe it.

No one knows everything as Stuart said above. And there have been a couple times where I thought about throwing in the towel, opening ImageReady and getting my slice tool out, but I just kept saying, "If Paul Boag can do it so can I!"

I would completely recommend Dan Cederholm's book, "Web Stardards Solutions". Paul recommended Zeldman's book and it is good if you want to know why but Dan teaches you how.

"Baby steps Ellie.... baby steps.."
Post by Debbie Downer on February 24, 2006 7:09 AM

Is the whole Kumbaya atmosphere getting to be a bit much for anyone (besides me)?

It's starting to seem like we're all supposed to be working for the greater cause of semantics and open-source and standards. Back in the day, web design was a job—you know that you did to make money?

Point being, if you have the ability to properly design websites, you ought to boast about it. You know the kind of chest beating that clients like. Even if some table–using–losers get their feelings hurt.

Don't get me wrong. I see the advantage of getting more designers onboard with standards. And gentle hand–holding is perhaps the finest form of encouragement. Perhaps when the standardites are the majority, IE will support CSS as well as Firefox. (Or better yet, people will stop using IE).

And I remember the day (not all that long ago really. . . okay it was last week) when I was waiting for Dreamweaver to support CSS (the day never came).

But I don't see any reason to hold back. Even if you do view the web designer community as a bunch of fun-loving hippies sitting in the jacuzzi naked talking about how they're gonna make the world better, you have to tell it like it is. Once you start saying things like, "Oh maybe that was too harsh" or "I shouldn't be so mean", then the honesty is gone.

For the record, designing websites with standards is good. But calling your self a "standardite" is queer.

Good discussion though. Thanks for the post.
Post by Paul Boag on February 24, 2006 12:06 PM

Well Debbie,
interesting point of view. Personally I disagree. If I went through life being blatently honest I would be divorced and have no friends! In my experience shouting about stuff is not the way to get your way or business. Presenting compelling arguements in a friendly and enthusiastic way will get you a lot further everytime.
Post by Nick on February 24, 2006 4:07 PM

Paul said:
I guess part of the problem is that we all feel constantly judged because anybody can pop the hood of our sites and see how they are put together.

And I have to agree. I also think that the feeling of "being judged" runs deeper than that. I mean, how many of us call ourselves "web designers" any more? Generally, at least where I spend my time and this could be different for others, "web designers" is a term reserved for the non-semantic crowd -- we wouldn't want to be judged like that, would we?

Or how many of us have perhaps lost a contract to somebody's "brother" (insert friend, kid, neighbor here if necessary) because we weren't able to properly explain the difference between what we do (and our hourly rates) to what someone with a copy of Dreamweaver can bang out WYSIWYG-style in a weekend. (Okay, that last bit was highly prejudiced against DW, sorry.)

I think the "impoliteness" you discuss that's developed between the standards crowd and has a lot more to do with these sorts of psychological issues even than some of the technical or educational ones.
Post by â€™Mas on February 24, 2006 8:39 PM

I've found the quickest way to convert someone to the concepts of a standards approach to building website is to send the person to CSS Zen Garden, which knocked me for a loop and convinced me after seeing the 3rd design. Since then, and it's only been the past several months, I have abandoned table layouts completely. Course, I have way too many sites that must now be converted from table layouts and very little time to devote to that. The learning curve has been steep at times, but there are some excellent resources avaliable to help the newbe get acclimated. Andy Budd's just-released book CSS Mastery is a very good example.

For those that brought up about available templates to build from, try out Open Web Designs ( http://www.openwebdesign.org/ ) that has nearly 1,500 design templates available for free.

ThatÂ’s my 2Â¢. :^{>
Post by Val on February 25, 2006 2:12 PM

I am really one of those "table-using-loser" as Debbie and others here puts it. But I feel that i'm stuck in that universe because all the sites I make is based on Content Management Systems that work this way. Templates nested within other templates. I have built an expertise on designing for these systems, where css is mainly used for formatting purposes.

As I'm new to all this css/xhtml I would like to know if I can make the jump to "the other side" and know that I can still offer my customers the choice of being able to fully control all content in a userfiendly way. What cms'es are there ?

Am I making sense?
Post by Paul Boag on February 25, 2006 5:33 PM

You are making perfect sense but to be honest I would be suprised if it isnt possible to make your existing cms work with standards. Basically if it outputs valid HTML you may well to able to style it as you want. Can you tell me the name of the CMS?
Post by james on February 26, 2006 3:07 AM

Stop crying. If you girls aren't meeting each other at conventions and posting the pics on Flckr you're crying about standards. Good God, doesn't it ever ever ever grow old.
Post by Paul Boag on February 26, 2006 9:30 AM

Well James I debated about whether to delete your comment or not but decided to leave it on. You perfectly demonstrate the problem with SOME web designers :)
Post by val on February 26, 2006 11:36 AM

Well I use more than one CMS, but a few of them are http://www.composite.net/composite-6.htm and http://www.dynamicweb.biz/

Good choice about not deleting the comment by James...
Post by Marston on February 26, 2006 12:20 PM

As for CMS's, I think if you want something that is powerful and customizable you should check out pMachine's expression engine http://www.pmachine.com/. For very simple and small projects I actually find Wordpress to work quite nicely for me. It especially plays well with CSS/XHTML and the template system is very easy to learn.
Post by wendy on March 24, 2006 6:03 AM

I can understand the frustration of these "standardites",
if web dev is how you make your living then people who do it sloppily give the profession a bad name- some web developers are purely scripters and do neither design nor programming- and have for a long time had to put up with the derision of designers and programmers for this- HTML being seen as the "easy part" of the project, Crappy code just strengthens this perception when the fact is to be good at this you have to be doing constant research and validation and compatability tests. If someone cannot google a tutorial and learn to develop a site properly they should rather not bother doing it at all - there is nothing wrong with having pride in your work.
Post by Laura on April 7, 2006 2:54 PM

I started listening to podcasts about a month or so ago. I picked up Boagworld and the Practical podcasts immediately, as quality is easy to spot. I listened to every show within two weeks and really enjoyed learning from them. Up until listening to those shows, I was an old school, HTML tables-based designer. I felt like a dinosaur. So I read a couple of CSS books, a load of web articles, and downloaded some samples, and now I am doing my first client site in XHTML & CSS, and I am shooting for an accessibilty rating of at least double A.
Here is the underlying truth: the web is constantly changing, so web designers/developers must change almost constantly, yet carefully, too. To say that you do it the old way because your software has you trapped or for any other reason, IMHO is just an excuse not to put forth the effort to re-teach yourself. I feel sorry for the poor people that work for businesses that think that if the money is coming in, don't touch it.
Post by dan on January 26, 2007 5:26 PM

standards r not bad, without standards we have never the ability to create nice looking websites that many people can enjoy, but also i don´t like to many standards. at time we have to much standards for standards in standards and it looks like that there is no end :-(
Post by Knuddel on February 4, 2007 6:01 PM

hehe i like the word "web-standards-gang" its much truth in it :-) btw. excellent article.
Post by biggi on March 30, 2007 1:19 PM

i think we have to much standardites at all. what can we do with all these stuff when the browser not support it or in a different way? it would be nice if there are some really standardites which work on all browser.
Post by daty on April 16, 2007 12:30 PM

Strength exists in CSS. He has possibilities precise defining and formatting the elements of the Web PAGES. Adventage CSS is separating introduction the side from her logical structure to the introduction is the advantage CSS. The new version will appear soon. He will grow rich new proprieties supposedly. He will allow to turn on or switch off suitable modules in browsers in dependence from temporary needs.
Post by Michael on July 12, 2007 7:48 AM

Stop crying. If you girls aren't meeting each other at conventions and posting the pics on Flckr you're crying about standards. Good God, doesn't it ever ever ever grow old.
Webhosting
Post by Communication Agency on August 18, 2007 8:35 PM

Yes Andy Clarke's comment is true comment. If you don't use standards you are dead designer. Communication Agency also building website with new standards.
Post by Hanson So on October 11, 2007 5:39 PM

Hey, I think it is completely okay. Everyone's standards are different. And life goes on.
Post by Samsonite on October 31, 2007 7:10 PM

We are trying to redevelop our old website in new CSS technique. So good ispiration on books and resources.
Post by Stefan on November 4, 2007 12:51 AM

Yes Andy Clarke's comment is true comment

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