Re: Slashdot: "Designers Ignoring Standards"

> It seems to me that a great deal of website designers were previously
> involved in "dead tree" design jobs, where the content stayed firmly in
> place once it was sent to the printer.  Even those who weren't so employed
> often think the same way.  Will standards ever address their expectations,
> or do they need to change the way they think?

Aside from the common perception that many Web designers come from
print backgrounds, in my experience within the corporate environment 
or pseudo-corporate world, there are generally other issues associated 
with this.

Firstly, the content tends to be owned, or must be approved by
the company's marketing department, so it's not very surprising
then that the Web is simply an alternative way to ship the same
content (and the afterthought, because the Web is new). 

Secondly, the processes which govern the shipping of content
are likely to be based on 'traditional' paper processes,
thus you have lots of (poorly structured) Word documents flying 
around before the Web designer might actually hear about it.

But that's the way it is - our job is not to author the content 
- we present it.

And to do a 'faster' job of presentation, one would expect
your Web designer to default to their favourite tool - 
Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc. The information which arrives
in their inbox or on their desk is unlikely to have been
'structured' - so your standards-aware Web designer will
have to do extra work in order to format these documents
so the final content is standards compliant.

Your standards-unaware designer has it easier ... it's much
too easy to whack the document in your less-than-compliant
GUI editor and push-button-ftp publish.

In other words, in cases like these, unless information 
handling processes are changed, standards will always
be the afterthought.

There is another phenonemon that I have noticed - in cases
where the thought occurs to management 'we should have a
website!' but often there is not enough resources to employ
another person to do the job. So someone without any prior
knowledge of publishing for the Web is lumped with the
job and this individual would have been most likely 
accustomed to Word or Wordperfect - therein lies a seed
for the WYSIWYG, pixel-perfect (inaccurate) 'ideal'.


cheers,
-steph
random web dudette
http://unadorned.org/
--

Received on Tuesday, 9 July 2002 20:02:34 UTC