Re: Proposed Design Principles review

On 4/27/07, Maurice <maurice@thymeonline.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 4/26/07 10:47 PM, "Ian Hickson" <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>
> > Consider that microsoft.com, google.com, and cnn.com are all
> > non-conforming today. I don't think we could even consider a change that
> > made browsers change their renderings of those pages.
>
> Would we ever be able to find out why they chose to stick with non
> conforming code even though the current standards have been well supported
> for a couple years now?
>
> I'm sure at some point in our lifetime one of these sites may have a
> redesign (mtv.com just had one). What reasons would these sites authors
> give
> for continuing to use broken code 5 years from now in a redesign?
>
> I know other (inexperienced) authors who haven't made the move to
> standards
> say that many things that have been removed or made invalid or illegal
> make
> it harder for them to do simple, common things. The most common complaint
> I've heard is no longer being allowed by the spec to use target="_blank"
> to
> open a new window. Of course if I point out they should use Javascript,
> they
> point out that I previously pointed out that they should always consider
> the
> experience of users who have javascript turned off...and it all goes in
> circles...


I often have to review  "professionally" prepared sites, some by the leading
IT contractors in the U.S., which fail miserably when validated.  It's been
my experience that some of the worst ones are generated by content
management systems or other automatic content conversion tools.

There's also the issue of retraining  application developers to move to a
web-based platform.  Some time ago, I attended an XML training class in
which the trainer knew virtually nothing about CSS or valid HTML.  The
legacy developers walked out of that training session with workbooks full of
XSLT examples with non-compliant HTML.  Even though we pointed out the
problem, what is the new XML developer going to remember?  That
pain-in-the-butt in the back of the room who kept correcting the trainer or
the examples in the workbooks that "work"?

I don't think anyone sets out to produce non-compliant content, but bad
habits get developed, and are very hard to break when the end result "works"
in whatever browser the developer chooses to test with.  I think that the
way this new version of HTML is presented is going to be crucial to its
adoption, and will only succeed if we can make a business case for compliant
development, just as the business case was crucial to the adoption of the
WCAG in many instances.



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