Another intro: "ivory tower" or "down in the trenches"?

Hi folks, my name is David Bobzien and I'm the webmaster for the University of Nevada, Reno.

Like most public higher education institutions, our web publishing is highly dispersed and downright chaotic.  My direct development responsibilities center on probably only 5% of the documents in the unr.edu domain, but I provide technical assistance and guidance to an incredibly disparate group of developers (admin aids, professors, student employees, etc.) building sites that constitute the university's web presence.

The importance of standards from my perspective:
1) As a public institution receiving federal aid for technology, we're on the hook for Section 508 compliance.

2) Web development in a large and open institution like ours is ephemeral- the student that designs a really whiz bang website ends up leaving quite a mess for the staff person left to manage it once they graduate/flunk out/whatever.  We waste untold sums of $$ and time reinventing the wheel with each site's baton passing- standards are one more way to keep everyone efficient and on the same page.

Strategy for standard's evangelism?  In addition to sounding like a broken record talking about 'em, implement standards in my projects according to tiers.

1) Internal sites for fellow university developers: standards all the way.  Demonstrate how much easier life is when you don't worry about making it look pretty in Netscape 4 (ex: my "home page": http://unr.edu/homepage/davidb/).  Provide validation links to challenge fellow developers ("how clean is your code?") and get them thinking.

2) Internal sites for university employees/students ("intranet"): Spoon-fed standards.  Build sites that degrade to Netscape 4, but allow for a noticeable difference in presentation.  Ex: http://www.unr.edu/outstandingresearchers/.  Built on a standard university XHTML transitional template, the light colored horizontal bar isn't displayed in Netscape 4.

3) THE site... www.unr.edu.  Standards as a goal.  The "top" of our site is a pathetic mish-mash of non-compliant code and work-arounds.  Little by little, I'm cleaning it up, but until Netscape 4 drops below 5% in our logs (it's still at around 18%), full standards compliance is politically impossible (but not as far as 508 compliance goes.)  The irony is that the majority of our Netscape 4 visits are from on campus (which leads me to the another standards strategy, eradicating Netscape 4 from campus desktops).

The idea is to move things along this "standards as a goal / spoon-fed standards / standards all the way" continuum. My interest in this group revolves around what I guess you would call the "cultural dynamics" of standards advocacy in large organizations.

Unrelated quick facts:
1) It's currently 106 degrees Fahrenheit outside.  This is the desert, but it usually only gets this hot down in Las Vegas.

2) Reno is nowhere near Las Vegas.

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 2002 20:08:54 UTC