[Fwd: Re: web standards project article]

I mistakenly neglected to include the list address in this reply to 
Ant's post of last week. (I wish there were a "standard" about how 
mailing lists behaved.)

...edN



Hi Ed,
It's great to know there are other like minded people out there.
Please post this to the forum as I think the more people we get speaking
with experience of how designers work the better.

Ant

ed nixon wrote:

> Ant wrote:
>
>> <snip/>
>> One of the main problems standards advocacy faces is that the 
>> majority of Web designers have a method of creating acceptable Web 
>> sites and simply haven't thought any further on the topic. 
>
>
> This is a really good point: I think of it in terms of methodology, 
> process and tools. The ways of doing web have evolved very quickly in 
> ad hoc fashion over a short time. The tools have tried to keep pace 
> with growth and demand, but at the same time have quickly evolved into 
> impediments to standardization because of their inflexibility and 
> because they have largely been grounded in visual or WYSIWYG 
> approaches. And the nature of the demand coupled with the technology's 
> fragmented immaturity have made it difficult to establish process 
> disciplines that ensure appropriate levels of consistency, compliance 
> and robustness. Example? The evolution of the web browser itself is 
> the most obvious. There are many others, among the most obvious web 
> editing software.
>
> This may be an over generalization and I suspect well intentioned 
> consultants, managers, and vendors of various products would object, 
> but I think there is at least a germ of truth here.
>
> The most difficult "innovation" to implement on the ground seems be 
> the simple first step of analyzing or planning content into some 
> meaningful, consistent and robust "semantic" (in the simple sense of 
> structured) form *minus* (or at least only loosely coupled with) it's 
> visual presentation. I tend, rightly or wrongly, to attribute this 
> difficulty to the overwhelming perception of the WYSIWYG-ness of 
> computer users -- users acculturated to computer technology solely via 
> the GUI interface and desktop system software.
>
> Of course, "you can't go home again" so we are left with this 
> tremendous task of educating just about everyone involved to the 
> underlying and has been said earlier virtually invisible attributes of 
> standardization -- which relates to Ant's second point. Advocating the 
> non-visual in a WYSIWYG culture is a daunting task in a skeptical age.
>
> ...edN
>

Received on Tuesday, 2 November 2004 13:16:17 UTC