Scott, from an accessibility perspective, I put http://www.seowebsitepromotion.com/enigma_log.htm together the other day. It advocates the move to accessibility and standards from a humanist perspective.
Now a more pragmatic approach - Sound like you're looking for an ROI reward-based argument. Well ... in the UK alone, silver surfers are a 14 ?billion market. Many will take advantage of text resizing in their browsers to make surfing a little more tolerable. Accessibility is build upon W3C standards. Get those sorted and the rest is easy. The point being, the more standardised your markup, the more traffic, from search engines whose spiders can more easily index the copy, to users who can more easily navigate, view and, if ecommerce, buy products ... and who will more readily bookmark the site simply because it is usable. Now throw in people with various impairments and the equation becomes more than just viable, it is vital to capture and retain their spending power by building sites to which they will gladly return and exercise their right to vote accessible. Now ... look to the future and we have a whole bunch of PDAs, WAP-enabled cellphones, tablet PCs and emergent technology whose screen sizes will vary but whose OS's (albeit proprietary in many instances) will accept X(HT)ML feeds. This is the present and the future. We're talking big, accessible, standards-compliant bucks. Without standards (irrespective of the who, why and wherefore of the originating bodies) web development would ramble on in the wilderness with numerous competing technologies vying for position and developers writing disparate browser-specific markup with a total disregard for the issues faced by either impaired users or those who elect to use non mainstream browsers like the Geckos, Opera or whatever. In my view, it's a falsehood to suggest that standards-compliant markup is a challenge to embrace. In comparison to using FrontPage or similar WYSIWYG editors then, yes, having to develop W3C compliant code and get your hands dirty is more time consuming and requires a greater knowledge base and effort on the part of the developer. But Web development, professional development, is not an easy task. Like any skill, their is a period of apprenticeship ... and some body - our peers and dare I say betters - must set the entrance and exit exams - the standards - to which we aspire. I take an active part in a few of these bodies because 1., I believe in what is happening within the industry, the move towards Time Berners-Lee's vision of a fully accessible communications medium available to all nations and individuals on the planet and 2., I like being paid to offer my clients a greater return on investment than they would otherwise expect from non-compliant development. It's good common business sense and a courtesy to develop for as great an audience as reasonably practicable. Mike Pepper Accessible Web Developer (after a good night's sleep, and a weird dream) www.seowebsitepromotion.com Administrator www.gawds.org -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Scott Barnes Sent: 08 July 2004 05:27 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Future.....(was: Re: [WSG] iFrames vs Scrolling Divs) Q. I've been on the List for a while now, and while i love the webstandards concept, i'm finding it hard to believe that the web will adjust itself to suite extensions like XHTML? The reason i say this is if we were to make a concious decision to move forward, it would be years 5+ before we would even see a shift in its coding standards alone, not to mention implementing STRICT. If this IS the case, what benefits are we getting as developers for taking on extra headaches in making it W3C compliant (who by the way aren't an international elected body - more of a group that have taken liberty to makeup standards). To me, tags like iframe are being used and quite a lot and do do away with them, is in many ways the kiss of death for movements like this, as you will be faught all the way. Even though the tag is a wrapper (defined in DTD) in many ways for the HTML Object it still leaves me wondering why tags like iframe aren't valid? to me they seemed harmless along with tags like B to STRONG so forth. Not to mention the web is looking to shift away from browsers, and move more to native XML packets to run its presentation layer on applications (ie MXML, AXML, XFORMS etc). It just seems lately to be a futile battle, and extensive one and yet no real gains? why would a developer go out of his/her way to learn XHTML? I personally use strict XHTML as its the only real DTD that fixes the Box Model bug in both IE & Mozilla (consistencey). Its got added pain, but i'm used to it now.. but others well they'd go "too hard pile" Regards Scott Barnes http://www.mossyblog.com Brian Cummiskey wrote: > Scott Barnes wrote: > >> Are you absolutly positive about iframes not being available in >> strict XHTML? because I've got one working as we speak? >> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" >> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd";> >> ?? > > > working and being valid are two different things all together. > ***************************************************** > The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ > See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > for some hints on posting to the list & getting help > ***************************************************** > ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ***************************************************** ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
