Ya know, I'm by all means no professional web designer, nor do I design
sites for anyone but myself... and my sites, at best, are only small
personal websites where I can display the few pixel and photoshop
goodies that I create in my spare time, blab a little about myself, my
goals, and how my days go, and give little dedications to the
people/causes that I admire and believe strongly in.
However, even I try my hardest to employ web standards to the best of my
ability.
Since most of the visitors to my site(s) are merely just friends and
loved ones, all of whom I've gotten to use Firefox and ditch IE all
together, my logs show that I only have 15% of visitors who use IE to
view my site (comprised both of Win and Mac versions), .8% use Safari,
another 5% is listed as unknown... The rest of my viewers use Firefox..
Needless to say, I don't let myself become overly stressed out if
there's a pixel worth of space between two elements that shouldn't be
there in IE. Nor do I bother digging through tons of articles and
tutorials on which hacks to use for IE Mac, and I don't bother at all
with Netscape 4x.
It's just not worth the time and energy to do all of that for the
measley existance of the few sites that I own.
In that same sense... I do agree with some of his thoughts... while the
reasonings might not all be true, I have to say that there are quite a
few people out there who think that you're going to go to website
Purgatory if you use a table in a layout (which, by all means, I do use
tables to display the Live Journal Icons I create... 4 to a row, several
rows until there are no more icons to show), and I might even employ the
use if Iframes, or god forbid, a splash page. And, if the mood strikes
and I create something nifty looking in Photoshop, I have no problem
whatsoever slicing it up properly and throwing it together in a table if
I can't figure out how to make it work using CSS (which I've had to do
on a few occasions).
I suppose the biggest point of his article was that if it works best for
you, then use it. But don't bring yourself to tears or go bald from
pulling out your hair if the site your developing doesn't target that
sort of audience, etc. Obviously, Web Standards Compliance has become
the latest and greatest buzz word on the web, or I wouldn't have even
discovered it. (It was actually the CSS Zen Garden that got me
interested in learning about it).
If you need your site to be accessible to all people, or your client
wants the ability to change the look of the site by only editing a mere
css file or two - then that's great! Web Standards are definitely for
you. If your audience consists of about 50 people whom you know
personally and talk to nearly every day, and you're lucky to get 1 hit
that isn't yourself per day - if you can't figure out how to do
something you WANT to do with web standards, there's no need to pull
your hair out and get in a frenzy over it.
I think that's why he said Use CSS when it makes sense. But then
again, I'm just a 21 year old girl, who does all of this in my spare
time as a hobby... I might be reading it a bit different than most of
you, as you guys are all in this for the long haul.
sam sherlock wrote:
Hi,
Just to put the cat amongst the peigons - some of the points raised
are valid IMHO.
and by the by so is the mark up. I think he is off mark on the use of
styles
My position is about temperance - moderation
‘reality in the field’ and not some ivory-tower specification - the
reality and work arounds required to compensate for differences in
implementation
CSS Hacks for example
The Web Standards have yet to be properly implemented in the majority
of the browsers BEING USED - namely Internet Explorer
this is partly why I dub IE inferior explorer, naughty-scape a fraise
I seldom use since netscape 4.X is a beast rarely encountered in the wild
Since when are using Floats for page-level layout, semantically correct?
I disagree with him here, since floating is applied by style and is
separate from content
I think this is a contracdiction since previouly
To not use CSS - rather I am saying to use it when it makes sense…
and in the case of floating to style the layout I would say that this
is appropriate use of style - using it here makes sense
his contracdiction continues
margins... to create page-level layouts. Again, like floats, this is
semantically incorrect, just like HTML tables
the point of style - the junk/old skool use is shims / transparent gif
- I don't like such sites even when I make 'em
Some times designers can procrastinate pontificate over semantics
(and many other things) delaying the sites completion
inflating the cost.
Rob Wilson http://www.websitesinbusiness.co.uk Says:
September 26th, 2005 at 3:52 am
http://www.killersites.com/blog/2005/silly-nerds-the-web-standards-are-for-browsers/#comment-33
The real point lost in the standards debate is that
