Artistry, Accessibility,
and Standards:
The Good News
Saturday, 9 December
CNET Builder.com
New Orleans
These standards were created ... with the intention of balancing the needs of designers for a sophisticated set of presentation and interactive features against the desire to make the Web accessible to the largest possible number of browsers (and other client devices) and environments.
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Disclaimers
WaSP Must Die!
You're all so smart and attractive
The Battle Royale with Cheese
Web as database vs. Web as free creative expression
(Mars vs. Venus)
The solution: Web standards
(sophisticated presentation meets accessibility)
Where We Came From: Linguini & Chickenwire
Clients don’t want physics papers
(designers hack the web)
Pottersville: A one-browser town
(Netscape hacks the web)
The First Interim Period
Life in a two-browser town
No Fault CSS (Furbo - wrapping divs in table cells)
IE5/Win: good CSS
The Rupture
4.0 browsers (Complexication - birth of WaSP)
The Second Interim Period (a.k.a. right now)
Three dramatic improvements in 2000:
IE5/Mac: great CSS, HTML 4, solid JavaScript
Opera 4: CSS, HTML, XML, WML, ECMAScript and DOM support.
Netscape 6: the whole megilla; all platforms
User upgrades: the 18 Month Pregnancy
Interim Approaches
Same old chickenwire
(unacceptable - spank WYSIWYG)
Standards-friendly
(no-fault CSS, tables, JavaScript 1.2)
Complexication (versioning) to the ninth power
Hardcore standards compliance
(risks)
Standards-friendly (no-fault): the fine print
text zoom - missing in IE5/Win
Stuck with tables?
Table pros:
Compatible with practically all browsers
Standards-compliant (though not in the spirit of W3C standards)
WaSP was done this way
The secret PDA benefit
Decision Factors
Clients (minimize this)
Audience
Altruism: the good of the web
Selling Standards
Don't ask, don't tell
Final phase coming soon:
True separation of style from content
Web accessible to all
Increased presentational and transactional sophistication
Streamlining of production
Reduced production costs
Spend more on content, concepts, design, user support
(better products, better content, better design)
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