We need to prod the fat cats, if one of the fortune 500 companies starts waving the standards flag others will follow

Believe me, I hear you there!

I just left a job at a big company (a.k.a. “The Old Job” herein) where they got all excited about standards, drooled all over the presentations and practical demonstrations I gave about how we could effectively use ‘em… and then brought in new upper management who completely dropped the ball and took a big dump on the entire idea of standards.

So now I have a new job at another big company (a.k.a. “The New Job” herein) where they seem to be at least a little more standards-friendly. It’s early, so we shall see.

There are some big companies that have embraced standards, though, as I’m sure you know (AT&T, Yahoo, ABC News…). But you’re right, we need more.

I also agree w/ what you said about small or one-person companies writing articles but never having experience with big sites. I find that annoying.

Thanks for commenting!

A quick “handle with care” on some of the other articles mentioned in your comment though. It is always good to check the writer of an article and his intended audience / working environment. A lot of “You’ll make millions / you’ll lose millions if you don’t adhere to standards” articles are written by one man companies who never got near a big corporation as their clients. And they sell their services and trainings, which means the first rule is not to say anything bad.

I am very much into standards development and it is great to have all those blogs, one-man-company and brochureware sites out there finally getting the drift, but the real impact has not happened yet. We need to prod the fat cats, if one of the fortune 500 companies starts waving the standards flag others will follow

I have published an article on digital web venting my annoyance at this titled

10 reasons why our clients don’t care about accessibility and will follow up with one in January (pending finishing my book first) with 10 reasons how developers create and follow their own myths about web standards

It is better to be prepared for the bad things to come. :)

The hope is that with IE 7, some of this stuff will be fixed and IE will actually render pages correctly. Or, closer to it, anyway. (The first thing they need to do is get the freakin’ box model right!)

Over the past year there have been a number of niggles with Firefox as it does not render quite the same as Internet Explorer. Although these problems are just as likely to be IE bugs rather than Firefox ones, the new version offers a ‘report a broken site’ facility. Whether this means that webmasters will be woken up at the dead of night by bearded hackers wanting to fix their HTML is unclear at this moment.

Sounds like you have a new mission!!!!

Garrett,

I’m not personally attacking people who aren’t good at HTML. And I’m definitely not saying anything negative about people who want to learn. It is great when people truly want to learn! That is the point of my post, after all - to point them in the right direction, so they can learn the right way. If I wanted to learn how to repair a transmission, I wouldn’t know where to start looking, much less how to tell a good reference from a bad one, and I would appreciate any guidance from people who have more experience.

Back to what I said about not personally attacking people who “know a little HTML” - obviously I am not saying they’re a bad person, or anything like that. But if they’re going to be meddling with web content, they either need to learn how to do it right, or stay out of it. I’m not going to go poking around under the hood of anyone’s car trying to fix this-and-that just because I know how to put gas in my car and check my oil - it doesn’t matter how good my intentions are (”if I help you maybe you can get on the road quicker!”), I simply don’t have the necessary knowledge and would most likely ultimately make things worse. The only question is the degree of fucked-upedness I will produce, not whether I will fuck things up or not.

And I would like to reiterate Roger Johansson’s quote which I quoted in an earlier post:

Web professionals who refuse to update their skills and insist on using outdated methods can no longer be called web professionals.

Some will call me an elitist for saying that. But think about it. Why should web professionals not be required to know their craft? I find that attitude – which is held by many in the industry and by many more outside of it – insulting to those of us who work hard every day to keep up with current best practices.

I figure since, if you google my name, my site is first, then I must be doing SOMETHING right.?!?!?!

I argued that while these concepts make a TON of sense, there’s no need to flog people who use crappy HTML to mark up “Bill’s List of 100 Great Horror Movies”, because these people aren’t committing some grave error. Bill just isn’t using his tools efficiently, which isn’t a sin worse than death, and probably doesn’t affect you very much.

Bravo on the vernacular-as-tool-of-oppression canard that you continue to use to define your discourse, but I’m sure by now you know that this isn’t really a defense but a sidestep. I think you are being uppity. Period.

Nice use of “canard.”

Anyway, I removed the relevant part of the comment from here, because I didn’t want the comment to be too long, and I wanted it to have one main focus. So if that’s bad practice on my part, oh well. I will now paste in for you, dear readers, what I said to Garrett in an email (because he emailed me this same thing) - then we’ll call it a day on that part, unless anyone wants to bring it up and beat a dead horse.

I said:

Ha! Oh, Garrett, come now… surely you don’t think that’s how I “define” myself. I just have to raise your hackles.

I did give one example of how bad development practices hurt - Dr. Lewis’s syllabus crashing my browser.

Here are just a few other examples.

• Blind users must access the web via screen reader software.
• Users with mobility impairments often cannot use a mouse and must navigate solely with a keyboard.
• Partially-sighted users (due to diabetes, MS, or a world of other conditions, including simply age) and color-blind users may not use screen readers, but poor design practices such as low contrast and fixed-width fonts can make using certain web sites very frustrating, unncessaril time-consuming, and sometimes near to impossible for them.
• Users browsing the web on mobile devices will often not be able to access at all a web site that is hard-coded into a fixed table-based layout. (WebMD, for example, makes my cell phone browser freeze.) Sites which use semantic markup and handle all the presentation through CSS (such as this blog) are easily accessible via mobile devices - users don’t get all the purty colors, but that’s not the point. They get the content. The content should always be the focus of any web site.
• Again, this translates directly to search engines. Semantically sound sites will have the highest search engine rankings, because the spider will crawl through it and easily be able to understand the structure of the document and what is relevant. Poor coding leaves a search engine befuddled, and leads to poor ranking.
• Finally, poor coding practices just increase file size, and hence increase download time, especially over slower connections. For users this means having to wait. For site owners, this means the users often don’t wait, but instead go somewhere else - hence the site loses viewers (and, by extension, money). Greater filesize also equals greater bandwidth usage, which is more money the company/site has to spend on its end. I would be happy to show you real word statistics on how switching to a standards-based design saved large sites huge amounts of money.

I could go on, but work beckons… that should do for now.

You ever notice, though, how strongly opionionated men are “strongly opinionated men” but strongly opinionated women are uppity or bitches?

I’ve called men uppity, but I’ve never called one a “strongly opinionated man”.

Bravo on the vernacular-as-tool-of-oppression canard that you continue to use to define your discourse, but I’m sure by now you know that this isn’t really a defense but a sidestep. I think you are being uppity. Period.