The Great Migration to Standards
September 12th, 2005
[ This following is the letter from the editor in the 9/12/05 UIEtips, a free newsletter we send out almost weekly. - Jared]
Greetings,
At User Interface Engineering, we focus a great deal of time researching the most promising design tools and materials available to development teams.
In the past year, it seems like everyone is talking about migrating to web standards like XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). ESPN.com and Wired.com are just two web sites that have moved to CSS implementations. We’ve done so too with our conference site.
What’s the big deal about these standards? And why should web teams invest the effort to learn new coding techniques and convert over to CSS and standards-compliant sites? In today’s issue of UIEtips, we’ve asked our good friend David Poteet, President of New City Media, to talk with Eric Meyer, who (quite literally) wrote the book on Cascading Style Sheets.
At User Interface 10, Eric and Molly Holzschlag will be teaching an entire day demonstrating how structured markup and CSS can work for you and members of your web team. We’re really excited about this seminar — it’s been one of our most popular sessions for years.
Have you migrated over to a standards oriented design? Are you thinking about it? I’m really interested in your thoughts. Leave me a message in the comments below.
Enjoy this issue of UIEtips,
Jared M. Spool
Editor, UIEtips
p.s. If you’re thinking about Eric and Molly’s seminar (or any of the other great sessions at UI10), you definitely want to sign up by September 13th to take advantage of the great pricing we now have. See the conference site for more details.
Read: Why eBay needs Standards-Oriented Design: An Interview with Eric A Meyer
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September 13th, 2005 at 9:48 am
In my case, we want to use only CSS for visual formating because this way the design person can alter the design any time she wishes with no need to alter or even see the JSP code that generates the HTML code. The coder only needs to write the names of the apropiate classes, divs and spans in the correct place.
You see, CSS is intended just for separating presentation from content. It’s not better or worse than using font tags in the HTML. It’s just a different method with different strong points and weaknesses.
We jave our our circumstances, which kind of force to use the CSS standard. We are having issues following strictly the MVC (model-view-controller) model, so inside the HTML code there are chunks of JSP code which can only confuse the designer. Also, the designer could alter the code when changing the layout. Also, sometimes the designer and the code need to work both at the same time in the same page. Also, when changing certain designs, the designer would need to alter many pages for just one small change, or the coder would need to rewrite parts of the code to adapt for the new layout.
Using CSS solves all these problems at once. The designer only needs to alter one or two CSS sheets, which will be only owned by her, no need to change anything in the HTML code*.
* Notice that you must have taken the precaution of using div names likes “secondary_navigation” or “menu_element” instead of “boxed_menu_at_the_right” or “square_link_decorated”, so you won’t need to change the names in the HTML when the vertical menu in the right becomes an horizontal menu in the left.
September 13th, 2005 at 10:11 am
More things:
Also, you can have a dedicated designer even if she has never touched JSP, and a dedicated JSP coder who may have no idea about design.
Also, as a consequence of the former, it’s easier to replace a member of the team then. If the coder goes, you only need to find someone who knows JSP. He won’t need to know both JSP and web design. Idem with the designer. The replacement will only need to knows CSS.
And of course, as time goes by, more and more users switch to more modern browsers, so by now most of our users are using browsers capable of rendering correctly page formatted only in CSS. I have read in forums that some people actually measure the peecentages of browsers in their server stats and will only stop supporting a certain browser when it goes below a certain threshold (say 1%). In our stats, almost every single visitor has a browser that can render CSS properly, so, for us, there is no technological excuse not to use CSS.
September 20th, 2005 at 9:10 am
It’s perhaps worth noting, though, that you can’t always and entirely separate presentation and content using this scheme. The way your HTML is structured supports only certain visual layouts. Major design changes sometimes require a little bit of reordering, or nesting of tags, or something along those lines.