Re: Does it matter anymore?

Carlos Narváez (21 oct. 2007 - 05:37) :
> What is the importance of w3c anymore, even if the major players don't
> follow their standards?

s/anymore//

If you follow the usual statistics, it has improved over the years.
Validation is an interesting indicator but hides many things. For  
example, a very small organization, or university which does its own  
Web site, will be more likely to be valid than a big company.  The  
very simple reason is that often it takes only one dedicated  
webmaster developing in-house tools and having conformance as heart  
to make the whole site valid, not just the home page.

What's happening often for big companies is that they are not in  
charge of the Web site. They either bought a CMS or they are asking a  
Web agency to create their Web site for them.

Let's take a company like [IBM][1]. There are 355,766 employees.
The company is represented by one person at W3C, who is in charge of  
communication the information to the rest of the company: [W3C AC Rep] 
[2]. This person in a big company is not the director of the company.  
Often he/she is the person in charge of one of the development  
department.

These big companies have at least one communication department maybe  
sometimes more than one (depending on the country) and very often  
hundred of Web sites. I'm pretty sure the galaxy of IBM web sites is  
very impressive.

The disconnection on validity and Members companies has nothing to do  
with the fact that a company doesn't care about Web technologies, but  
more about the internal disconnection between development department  
and communication department on one side. And about the often poor  
knowledge of some Web agencies about Web standards.

Let's take another side of the problem, some Web agencies care about  
conformance and validity and they even made a business of it. They  
deliver a Web site which is valid to the customer. Then the customer  
puts into its own CMS and everything is falling apart because the CMS  
is adding poor markup. Here the trouble has two sources:

* The quality control of a Web site is an ongoing project
* The mechanisms for content input have to be delivered WITH the web  
site.

A little call for Web agencies and people who really care about  
validity.

	When you create a Web site for a client.
	Do not just deliver a Web site.
	Create the tools which maintain the quality of the Web site.

A Web site is a live environment. It needs to be nurtured.
We already explained a few times how we do it at W3C, and there are  
still troubles sometimes, but we try to keep going on that.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/LogValidator/
http://www.w3.org/QA/2003/03/web-kit
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/Web-Quality
http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/04/how-to-create-a-valid-website



[1]: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AIBM
[2]: http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/organization.html#AC


-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***

Received on Monday, 29 October 2007 06:00:32 UTC