David Pietersen wrote:
Sorry, trying to be aware of the request to stay on topic, but...
> You shold be more forward-thinking if you're responsilbe for .gov
web site. (No offence, please.)
I never said my site was not compliant. Every page of anything I
serve (apart from the legacy apps) works perfectly in FireFox and
Opera, and has at least a 1 A rating. The content even works on my
pda, which is Pocket PC of course ;-)
My whole point is... why bother? Why spend the massive amount of time
(and therefore 'the peoples' money) making it work across all these
technologies when practically everyone who is using it has access to
IE. It is JUST a browser, heck, you don't even need to pay for it.
Years ago, in a different organisation I worked for we made a piece of
'Windows Only' software available for free. The 'Apple People'
screamed their heads off for three months until we also made their
version available (at GREAT expense to the organisation). I left
about nine months later, and at that point 0 (zero) people had
actually downloaded it. Not one. Zilch.
I respect everyones right to be different, but there comes a point
when kowtowing to the vocal minority is just not fiscally responsible.
Anyway, I did not mean to hijack your list. This is my last post on
the subject. Have a good day :-)
IMHO, it seems to me that everything you are saying here are basically
all the same reasons to adopt web standards as part of the systems
development lifecycle. It does take more effort to learn to apply web
standards, but the whole point is that there is less pain for both the
user and developer in the process. If you can't see that then why
bother, and I'd have to agree with you, just go back to being happy with
tag soup.
But there is also something else at play here, in that if it is a
government department, there is probably some form of CMS involved and
all the government procedures for managing digital documents, and that
may or may not allow easy upgrades in the design, and some systems/CMSs
are a nightmare to try to deploy standards compliant web sights.
In regards to large organisations, you are right, if the site is quite
workable and accessible, it may create more problems than it's worth to
try and implement a fix.
But at the same time I think the experience of people on this list is
that they achieve everything you aim for in accessibility and multiple
deployment, and maybe more so, by using web standards, at least in the
environments they work in. Not only that, when you want to redesign
your site, in any way, let alone upgrade it to address future
technologies or devices, there is a lot of evidence to show that there
is a big difference between those who do so with a base of standards
compliant documents and those whose ones are marked up in "tag soup".
This is something that quite often cannot be solved just by developing
in web standards. In large organisations the real problem is systems
that are able to transform documents whilst maintaining the document
structure, semantics and metadata. There are hardly any systems out
there that can do that. But those who are looking to solve these
problems, and have a keen eye to making sure the architecture and
systems they are using will be able to accommodate such changes, along
with being able to quickly adopt new technologies like SVG, AJAX, etc,
will be in a far better position than those systems that are not trying
to address these problems.
Also, IMHO, I feel that the overall quality of solutions offered as a
web standards approach as opposed to "tag soup" will always offer
superior advantages when do well.
Regards
Geoff Deering
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