Web Design and Development

Looking over my Google Reader the other day, all I saw from the new A List a Part issue was Daniel Malls new Swifr technique using flash to give you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website. I totally missed the article written by Ethan Marcotte titled, “Where Our Standards Went Wrong”.

What it represents to me
This article represents everything that I talk about when producing Web Standards valid templates and then handing them over to a backend system that demolishes the time and consideration I put into creating the templates with great valid code. One great point of how validation can benefit are lower maintenance costs.

My experience today
I experienced this very thing today while at work. The sites we work on were not created through our company, but was contracted out to a large ecommerce development company before we had a development team. It is a div based layout, although the code and CSS are poorly written. There are about 18 websites all sharing the same template platform. Anyways we have site managers that work inside of a not so great CMS, who update content and other sections. There was an issue with one of the sites layout breaking and it turned out to be a non closed div tag in one of the administrable content areas. Finding this problem took forever and trying to go into the validator and pinpoint what might of been wrong, there were some 300+ errors. It was an unneeded speed bump brought on by non web standards code.

Ethans point on time spent in non valid code:

I found that approximately fifteen percent of my time was spent mired in invalid code. As an independent designer/developer/something, I’m grateful for all the work my clients send me. Still, what if I was a salaried employee? If IT departments conducted a similar audit, I’m confident they’d find similar numbers. And this kind of auditing needs to happen. Invalid sites may look the same as those built on a foundation of valid, well-formed code, but in my experience, they invariably cost more to maintain. This is the silent weight of invalid code, a hidden cost we don’t discuss nearly enough

The Selling Point
The main selling point, which Ethan points out are the very things I have been preaching to clients, co-workers, bosses and friends.

• Shorten development cycles, as we no longer have to slog through through six layers of nested tables to build site templates.
• lower maintenance costs
• decrease page weight, which in turn reduces page load times and dramatically lowers bandwidth costs
• The promise of device independence
• The presence of a metric against which an individual or a team’s production can be measured
• The knowledge that your site is future-proof, displaying in any standards-compliant browser yet to be invented

My favorite quote
The following quote is so true and I really find it to be dead on with the design and functionality of ecommerce applications:

To be honest, the pragmatists are right: that for the most part, validation and commercial web design are polar opposites

After working on an ecommerce platform I find this to be so true. If you look at the top 15-50 internet retailers you wont find a single site that completely validates or even has a nice clean well laid out design. I think its because there are so many different layouts packed full of different options, products and functionality that it make it so hard to keep our CSS streamlined and our markup beautifully semantic. Over the next year or so I am making it my challenge to turn the front-end code of our sites to just this and show the other so called top sites, that it can be done!! Its just about how passionate you are about what you do and if your passionate in web standards there is no, it can’t be done!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under Web Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.