Posts in the Standards Category

The last paragraph of Wired’s article “Browsing Around for New Targets” caught my attention:

But one HTML contractor, who asked not to be named, illustrated the uphill battle the WaSP faces in getting programmers to lay aside their old browser-specific tricks: “Do you know how much I get paid for knowing this stuff?”

Yep.  And can you imagine how much more you’d be paid if you knew how to code to standards, thus delivering a superior product with outstanding delivery capabilities?  Not to mention what kind of reputation you’d build up for doing so, and how much more you could charge then?

Actually, it occurs to me that something the WaSP ought to do (if they haven’t already; we’ll find out tomorrow) is create an executive-level whitepaper that basically says, “If you’re still shelling out for multiple versions of a site and 80KB HTML source, you’re paying way too much for way too little.  Stop paying people to know how browsers worked two years ago, and start paying for people who know how to make your site work two years from now.”

• Monday, 10 June 2002 was published on Monday, June 10th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

Revenge of The 508 Follies: So the U.S. government’s Section 508 Web site has removed its “best viewed with” line that caused me such angst last week, which I suppose is a positive step.  Unfortunately, they have yet to fix either their HTML or CSS to be valid.  I’d rather they had fixed the code and left the annoying text… but I suppose I should be grateful that some improvement has occurred.

• Wednesday, 10 April 2002 was published on Wednesday, April 10th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

The 508 Follies, Take Two: I got e-mail yesterday morning from a U.S. government Web developer who was reacting to Tuesday’s semi-rant.  In addition to expressing embarrassment over the state of the Section 508 Web site, he pointed me toward an article on Government Computer News—a site I hadn’t known even existed, but plan to visit from now on—titled “Section 508 site takes own advice.”  (That constitutes 100% of your recommended daily allowance of irony, by the way.)  As my correspondent said about the article: “Apparently they recently redesigned their site and the old one was actually worse.”

For some reason I’m put in mind of the song “Don’t Worry About the Government”:

Some civil servants are
Just like my loved ones
They work so hard and they
Try to be strong

For those of you in the civil services who are still working hard and trying to be strong, which I suspect is a lot harder these days, a tip of my hat and most heartfelt thanks to you.

• Thursday, 4 April 2002 was published on Thursday, April 4th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

I waited a day on posting this, just to make sure nobody thought it was an April Fools’ joke.  Go to http://www.section508.gov/, which is the central hub for information on the piece of U.S. Federal law that mandates accessibility in all Web sites of government agencies, and of those businesses and organizations that do business with or receive money from the U.S. government.  Look at the bottom of the document: “This site best viewed with MS Internet Explorer 5+”.

What?

So I ran the site through the W3C’s markup validator, and got back a report that their markup is broken.  Go figure.  Neither does their CSS validate, and I’m not just talking about the metric ton of warnings the page generates.  No wonder their site looks best in IE5 (for Windows, I assume): odds are it’s the only widely available browser sloppy enough to tolerate their slipshod authoring practices.

It’s things like this that really sap my faith in the intelligence of my fellow man.  Well, that and the e-mail response I saw from the maintainers of the site, which basically said, “IE is the biggest gorilla on the Web so the other 10% of our users can sod off.  And so can you.”  I expect that kind of thing from 14-year-old fanboy site authors, not the people in charge of the government Web site about how Web sites are supposed to be open and accessible to all users.

I’m going to say it right here and now: “this site best viewed in browser X” is shorthand for “this site’s maintainers are too lazy to think about standards compliance, user experience, or cross-browser design.”  Before I get all kinds of “pot, meet kettle” e-mail regarding meyerweb and how it’s designed, you’ll note that I never claimed the site would look better in one browser or another.  If anything, this site looks best in a browser that supports W3C standards.  And I have nothing against their font-sizing widget; I use one myself.  What bothers me is that they can’t be bothered to take simple steps towards the very principles their site espouses, and the browser favoritism they show as a result.

“This site best viewed with MS Internet Explorer 5+”… cripes.  Some days I wonder why we even bother.

• Tuesday, 2 April 2002 was published on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.