Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Web Standards [a visit by John Allsop]

John Allsopp stopped by last week for a 'passionate' talk about the importance of web standards.  I really enjoyed the talk and learned a lot from it hence this blog.


......Are you in need of a vacation from your life - where a beach, a cabana and a cold drink in your hand felt more like a necessity? Say you were to surf for vacay spots. You then decide on Tuvalu or Timbuktu [stay with me]. You search online using your preferred browser, make reservations and mozzie on over there. When you get there, everyone speaks a language you do not understand, and likewise, they do not understand you. Huge Problem! Thankfully, the world has an unofficial universal language a.k.a. English! A nice, funny and humor filled book about this fascinating language, (as per recommendations from Mr. Allsop) is The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson.

So what does English have to do with web standards? Everything! well kinda. Albeit a metaphor, English, much like web standards affords consistency, eases the sharing of information, reduces cost, and saves time. In similar ways, web standards enable consistency of information across browsers and other electronic devices accessing the web, gives web pages a longer shelf life, eases the burden on developers to have code functional across browsers, and - of course - results in huge cost savings. 


Referenced from Designing with Web Standards
In his book Designing with web standards, Jeffrey Zeldman discusses forward compatibility in relation to web standards. He writes, "designed and built the right way, any page published on the web can work across multiple browsers, platforms, and internet devices—and will continue to work as new browsers and devices are invented..". He also goes into length of why web standards are important. Take browser sniffing code for example. Owing to the complexities in each browser and their upgrades, developers have had to write browser specific code, a practice that is not only costly and time consuming but births a myriad of problems such as double digit browser versions that Mr. Zeldman says shows "fallibility of UA sniffing..". [The User Agent (UA) is a "short string of text that contains the browser's name, version, and platform, and acts as a digital fingerprint for the browser", which unfortunately can be undetectable in certain circumstances. This in turn means that browser specific code is not executed] 

My browser of choice currently - Firefox. Firebug plus other Firefox add ons make it my to-go-to browser. I also enjoy an online game or two. What I really dislike is a message - IN RED no less - that I cannot play said game on Firefox... and I have to switch.... bla bla bla. Annoying!! To say the least. Now - if all browsers conformed to web standards - such uniformity would make for a much richer user experience.

The CSS Zen Garden is an excellent website that shows just how powerful web standards can be. Each of the designs incorporate the exact same base HTML code and the examples therein [with the help of CSS] exemplify the many ways design can vary, despite having the same code.

Invalid Markup is another problem that web standards will take care of. I have written code in times past, where I inadvertently forgot to close a tag or two. Most browsers have rendered the page but a few catch the mistake. Bad Markup that is not picked up by browsers will only cause problems down the road which makes debugging/redesigning more difficult, where old problems crop up as new ones. This only adds to time and cost spent on the whole development process.

There is yet to be a browser that is fully compliant with web standards [as laid down by the W3C ] but with more noise generation from developers and users alike, the future does look promising when compared to times past when browser compatibility was - to a much larger extent - wishful thinking.

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