Hi Andreas,
None of the general public cares about whether our sites are AAA compliant,
whether they follow any standards or guidelines or not. What they want is a
site that works.
True and so they should have.
If you buy a washing machine and it tells you "This washing machine follows
the "AS/NZS2040" standards - do you care? Would you get out the manual and
read up on the AS/NZS2040 standard? And if you do care, then probably only
because you spent good money on that washing machine.
No... but if I bought a washing machine that used too much water, or it
started to rust when it get in contact with water I would care. Wouldn't
you? The same goes for the other analogy about building a house... I do
care what kind of bricks etc they use. I'm gonna have it for a long time!
Same thing goes for a web site... why not get the most quality you can
get (markup wise)?
The general user spends no money on a website. It works? Good. It doesn't
work? Bad.
But do they know not everybody runs XP/IE6? Just because the site looks
good on their screen... blah blah
These icons with "AAA", "W3C", "HTML", "XHTML" on it only confuse most
users. So often in usability tests I have heard users ask me: "What does
this mean"? Not because they care about standards, but because it is
something on the website that means absolutely nothing to them. Too many
people are already uncomfortable using website technology, how much more
terrifying do you make it by dumping technical abbreviations and standard
codes onto your site?
Some people would like to know... others don't! Give them both a chance
to do what they want. When you buy a car are you not interested in
horsepower, economy etc? Besides... if you add the icons to your site
why not send them to a page that explains before they hit the validator?
In my opinion the icons are mostly put onto the sites to make people feel
better about the work they have achieved. Web Developers spent a lot of time
making their sites standard compliant without anybody really noticing. By
putting an icon on the site we have found a way to say to other web
developers: "Hey guys! I have put a lot of hard work into making my site
standards compliant! Now I want people to see it."
Maybe or maybe not. There is also such a thing as "awareness" and the
only way we get anywhere is by letting people know.
Coming back to the nice building codes analogy from earlier in this thread:
have you ever seen a house with a huge sign on it: "This house is standards
compliant"?
No... but I've seen... "this house was build using only ecological
construction materials" or "these houses are kids safe" so I do see
people trying to differ from others using what they have.
This is funny... a couple of day ago I watch a program on TV where these
politicians should try to acts as a deaf/dumb, a blind person and the
wheelchair user. There was this one politician who has all the right
opinions and was so focused on disabled people. Then this guy asked him
this... "now that you're so into all the problems and so "down" with the
disabled people why is it I can't access your parties website"
Go figure
Kim
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