Re: Converting to standards... (sort of)

At 8:26 +0100 9/25/02, Andrew McFarland wrote:

>At 08:01 24/09/2002 -0400, Karl Dubost wrote:
>>1. Choice of high/well known websites
>>2. Traceability of the conversion (techniques used for it)
>>3. Authorization of the Web site owner? (often almost impossible, 
>>because people do not reply to individual request for major 
>>websites, another problem of Quality)

    I will say that I didn't ask KPMG if I had permission to fix their 
site, I just did it on the grounds that they obviously weren't about 
to do it themselves.  Then again, I picked a case where the site was 
so badly broken in Gecko-based browsers that I figured they'd be 
happy to have a fix offered to them.  If I'm wrong, they'll probably 
send me a cease-and-desist order, and which point I'll cease and 
desist.  And post about it.

>And 4. `Ownership' of the code. I wouldn't mind contributing to, 
>say, Dmoz.org[1] for free, but I wouldn't want to spend several tens 
>(or hundreds) of hours on a commercial website without some benefit 
>to me.

    In the first place, an effort of the kind I undertook isn't one of 
tens or hundreds of hours.  I invested less than three hours in 
fixing the DOM scripting and tweaking a bit of HTML, and I'm not even 
a DOM expert.  Ironically, I didn't even touch their CSS.  I imagine 
someone familiar with the DOM and Javascript could have done what I 
did in half the time, or less.  So let's assume a full-on makeover of 
the site would take 20 hours.  Divide that up between four people and 
you get maybe six hours per person, once accounting for overlapped 
effort, which is inevitable in any team project.  That's not an 
unreasonable investment, in my opinion.
    As for the benefit to you, it's derived from demonstrating that 
standards support is more powerful and easier to accomplish than most 
people seem to realize.  It's also possible that you'd get some 
benefit from having your name associated with such a project, or 
series of projects.  I'm more concerned with the benefit such efforts 
would confer on the community as a whole, not to mention the users of 
the sites that get fixed.

--
Eric A. Meyer  (eric@meyerweb.com)  http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/
Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide,"
  "Eric Meyer on CSS," "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference," and more
   http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 2002 10:38:38 UTC