As many of you know, I currently make my home in Las Vegas, in the hopes of picking up some design work here and there. I used to live in the more upscale part of Vegas, but after the recession began, I ended up moving to the more downtown area. I am currently taking a few classes at the community college, mostly to move forward with an engineering degree, as well as to see how much I can grow as a designer with new challenges.
Today, when I arrived home from class, I decided to take a long walk to get a sandwich. Now, I could easily have sat at home and made myself a tomato sandwich with oat grain bread, and microwaved it to make it at least a little warm. Well, the sun was out and it was a cloudless day – as are most days this time of year – so I thought it was the perfect time for a nice stroll to the local deli.
As I walked, I stared at the walls on and off, and I noticed the patches of paint that had been last-minute thrown up on them. Now, mind you, this isn’t necessarily the poor section of town. It’s more the middle class area – one of those types with a nearby elementary school, that had been around since the late sixties to early seventies and during the prime of its years had been where the well-to-do people had lived. The paint itself was there to hide the corrosion that the last few years had done to the proud walls; it hid cracks and areas where the original paint had perhaps begun to peel away under the glare of the sun.
It reminded me of people in general. We tend to paint ourselves to hide where the corrosion of the world has ground upon us, but for what? Do we want to look like the walls do? Or do we want to be true to ourselves?
Designers perhaps have a hard time with this. As standards come and go, the web itself is constantly changing. It’s much different today than it was in years past, and because of this, we use paint to hide our flaws. Hacks for IE6, non-compliant code, the works. I’ve gone on and on about the bad Ferraris, but now let’s take a look at how things degrade over time.
Browsers are always changing and evolving. Firefox and Opera are prime examples of this, in addition to Google’s addition of Chrome. Internet Explorer not so much; after all, it took nearly six years for Internet Explorer 7 to come out, and Internet Explorer 8 is only still in the works. Nevertheless, CSS3 is slowly becoming acceptable – namely things such as opacity and alpha filters, as well as CSS-rendered rounded edges (when in the past, either JavaScript or images and rather complicated implementation had to be used in order to implement the fun, rounded corners effect). Standards compliant code will need the least amount of paint in order to remain functional, as browsers are evolving in order to suit standards all the time (as opposed to moving away from them or changing them – only Internet Explorer seems to force its own standards on design.)
But what exactly are web standards? Standards are set by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, which are basically the really intelligent guys who have given designers a set of rules to follow with code. It is the general specifications given to the technical aspects of web pages in order for code to be globally accepted in order to standardize the best practices for the web. To simplify, if you follow the rules of the W3C and write code that is valid according to technical specifications, your code will last much longer. Not only that, but it means that more people will enjoy your pages, because they will be usable and accessible.
It’s more than just passing a validation test, or trying to do your best to please a client. Sticking with design standards also means that you protect yourself from liability suits (refer to the recent Target lawsuit) and it also means that you are delivering quality designs. Quality, at least in my eyes, is far more important than quantity. Quality sites last much longer, create less headaches, and will help your client reach their target audiences far more than a quantity of sites will.
That said, here are some tips to keep to accessibility:
- Validate. Dreamweaver CS3 has its own mark-up validator built in, and W3C has its own handy code validation services.
- Read documentation. Mozilla’s developer community has its own documentation, and there are indeed a wealth of reference material on the web. Here’s a link to one of my Delicious tags of reference material I use while coding.
- Stay on top of trends and changes. Check out what browser supports what; this handy sheet shows a detailed analysis of each browser and what it supports.
