I'm here because I'm lazy - a personal intro.

I’m here because I’m lazy.

I don’t like having to do work twice – different conditional markup and scripting for different browsers. I live and work in the U.K. and have both professional and personal interests in websites.

Having become aware of the Web Standards movement through WaSP a couple of years ago I’m trying to apply this philosophy to both work and home sites. At home I can play as I like, at work I am faced with a committee or two and specifications that are not open, and a narrow subset of browsers used for testing.

It was the realisation that my existing sites were not suitable for use by people with visual difficulties that made me stop and reassess what I was doing and how I could improve matters. The writing of an educational site for someone else (a charity) made me realise that it was sea change that was needed. For this I’m concentrating on blindness and colour blindness as a start. The RNIB (UK sight organisation) has been helpful in providing guidelines for some of this. 

So my aims are to write everything in XHTML 1.1 using CSS and minimal client side scripting – I’ll have to use server side scripting using PHP to access MySQL – and display results in non-conformant browsers (e.g. NS4 series) with a warning message. I’ll test in Opera 6, IE,6, NS 7 and Moz 1 as there are the browser offering of the future, and also internet devices and mobiles as and when I can persuade my friends to see how sites look on theirs. I’ll also try to find speech browsers so that I can check that my sites make sense.

Regards evangelism – I’m in the middle of writing a personal site promoting Web Standards for the amateur site builder – and trying to assist friends in making sites compliant. At work I am running education courses for Web Standards – but I really need big guns to get on my side for this to have a real effect.

And from this forum – hopes that there are sufficient people contributing from the grass roots of web design rather than just the experts – and one of the things I’m looking for is ideas on how best to promote standards and education material which is as good (or better) a quality as that already available for non-standards HTML.

Above all we really need a consistent approach that can be followed, maybe by grading educational material already out in the public domain as suitable/not suitable for standards complaint education. 

Ramble over.

John

Received on Monday, 8 July 2002 06:34:44 UTC