The publishing system only allows the addition of content in one area, which is actually a single table cell. Developers are expected to use the minimum of HTML, and preferably no JavaScript at all. It's pretty restrictive, and standard university web pages are fairly dull, as you might imagine.
I wouldn't call that restrictive *enough*, having been there and done that ;) Uni pages are not exciting and everyone should relax and get used to it - the audience wants correct, current information and nothing more. Artistic faculties invariably complain and they have a point. However they usually take the wrong tack. Rather than try to make "corporate" into "artistic", they should have a separate creative zone where they can be arteests, the uni's corporate website is not an art gallery. As I pitched it, the corporate website is the venue and not the performance/artwork. You can only wow your audience *after* they've successfully bought tickets, safely found their seats and know where to find the bar, toilets and exit. But I digress.
It's been very difficult for me to make a case to change these pages, because they look fine (if you don't check the structure). In fact they look better than a lot of other pages on the university web site. Should these pages be changed.. or should *I* have my head examined? My main question is - why do browsers allow this kind of mess to work?
Nobody will care that they don't validate. But, you might get some traction this way: 1) Massively invalid code can have unpredictable effects for search engine visibility. You might get lucky, or you might get skipped. Who knows? Still, the surrounding table-laden page is a bigger problem for SEO anyway. 2) Massively invalid code might break in future browsers. Not because they're going to start insisting on valid code, they just might get it "wrong". You've got a better chance with valid code. 3) By breaking the uni's standards, they make it impossible to update the surrounding templates with confidence - the non-standard pages might break. So if/when the table site is updated with something done in XHTML+CSS, those developers may have to redo their site. To put it another way, they're probably creating more work for themselves in the long run. 4) The pages aren't really accessible. Through dumb luck the nested pages probably don't actually make the situation worse; but the uni couldn't argue that they've met any accessibility legislation with something like that. 5) Uni websites are periodically surveyed by web experts. The uni will look bad when those lists are published. The powers that be probably won't care what the list is about, but they'll care when they're not number one :) Most of these arguments aren't very strong. I'd focus on "more work", "hard to maintain" and "we'll look bad in website analysis". Good luck :) cheers, Ben ps. I'm assuming you're already subscribed to WANAU? :) http://wanau.org/ -- --- <http://www.200ok.com.au/> --- The future has arrived; it's just not --- evenly distributed. - William Gibson ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
