Page 1 of 3 What if every time you wanted to repaint a room, wallpaper a bathroom, or install a new stove, you had to completely pull down the entire foundation of the room and put up a new one? What if, like a military family, you were required to completely uproot and move every year or so? And what if, like a Joker or an Ace, you were part of a house of cards that was ready to collapse each time you touched anything?
Many people who have Web pages live with these precarious virtual housing conditions. They have a structure where design and information are so intertwined that touching one also affects the other. The HTML code may be littered with font tags, tables for layout, and numerous adjustments to ensure that pages work on multiple browsers and platforms.
How did we get here? How did designing Web pages elude standards for so long? To answer that question, we have to look at the original intent of Hypertext Markup Language, and what it became when designers molded it to their "Ulterior Decorating" purposes. We have to look at early browsers and the fallout of the browser wars of 1997–98. We have to look at bloated browsers whose tolerance of mistakes led to sloppy habits.
Then we have to look at how we can escape from this unsatisfying quagmire, and gently urge the Web to standards that will lead to accessibility for all, design without agony, and communications that are clear and elegant. We can build dream houses, for which there will be no further need to call in the bulldozers when we all we want is a simple paint job.
If we go back to when the web page creator metaphorically lived in caves, we will remember that HTML was meant to offer a simple, no frills language to mark up data so that information could be exchanged among scientists. When the Internet exploded for the rest of us, it wasn't long before the instinctive artist in human beings rebelled against the lack of paintings on the virtual cave walls. Soon tables, which were intended for the exchange of tabular data, were usurped as containers for layout. Font tags were added to new versions of HTML so that color, faces, and style could be added to text. Background color properties were added to tables and their cells. Now at least we had a log cabin standard of living, but that was still not enough.
Designers wanted "running water and electricity": Flash, Fireworks and streaming media wired in every room of the house. Browser building companies wanted to satisfy these insatiable demands, as well as keep market share. Soon the major players were competing with each other to bring more and fancier features to the Web. Of course, each had its own proprietary way of doing so. The software also had to become big and bloated in order to detect many possible coding mistakes. Remember those all-night downloads of the latest version?
We were now living in virtual palaces with gadgets and gizmos galore. Page builders were keeping running lists of conditional statements in their heads. If this is Netscape, type Margin Width and Margin Height; otherwise, type Left Margin, Top Margin for Internet Explorer. If this is a Mac, font size is based on a screen resolution of 72ppi, but for a PC, count on 96ppi. On and on it went, and one could only hope that pages didn't crash certain browser configurations. Then too, browser building was a moving target. When the next version came out, what proprietary methods would emerge was anyone's guess. Web design lists were full of anguished cries that the latest browser had vanquished their sites. Users of assistive technology were largely ignored, and users of older equipment and browsers were left out in a tent.
This sad state of chaos appeared to be a permanent condition, and then the Web Standards Project (WaSP) was born in 1998. What if standards could be created, and browser companies urged to comply with them? What if software companies could be urged to create Web editors that further promoted these standards? Would we all live in virtual Frank Lloyd Wright-built homes?
The revolution has been picking up momentum. WaSP leaders like Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer are actively evangelizing for the cause of elegant, clean, usable design. The hunger is there. In May 2004, Zeldman published his book Designing with Web Standards and, in one of those almost unheard of feats in the computer book world, was sold out by June.
So what are these standards, and do they have practical application in today's Web sites? What would the building inspector be marking down on her clipboard if she were to rate your pages? Let's review some of the essential points in the standards concept.
The fact that many pages created using these standards have not been exactly inspiring has slowed progress to some extent. Designers, who created the company Web site with the goal of establishing brand, were not exactly excited to jump on board if all CSS driven sites looked the same and made the Web look like a housing development. With the days of unlimited Web site budgets behind us, however, their overwrought designs have become a liability. Many of them were created in graphics programs and put through the program's "convert to HTML" utility instead of being built in HTML editors. The designer got to lay out pages in a visual environment by dropping elements on the page, slicing the components up into individual graphics pieces that could be reassembled in complex tables, and creating skin deep beauty that broke the first time an update had to be added. Redesigning such sites meant starting from the basement up and could take months.
Still, many of them are gorgeous. Add in captivating Flash elements and you have a complex city that would cause L'Enfant to stare in amazement. Who could give up such airbrushed beauty? Certainly those purists at the WaSP were coming across as insistent fanatics who, like so many hair stylists, were imploring you to cut off all your hair and adopt the latest minimalist do.
Many exponents of the Web Standards Project are taking the challenge to prove that standards and beauty need not be mutually exclusive. The CSS Zen Garden exists to showcase beautiful sites created with Web standards. The WaSP does not demand that designers totally forego the use of basic table markup for layout purposes. You will not be a Bad Designer if you use hybrid table/CSS designs for certain types of sites. Still, many high profile sites like ESPN, Sprint and ABC News have made the leap to table-less layouts.
Keywords
HTML, XHTML, CSS, Web Standards, WaSP, content, presentation, structure, accessibility, div, table
