W3C standards, does anyone care?

[blastus]

I'd like to put out these questions to the community to find out what they think about them:

1. What percentage of professional web designers/developers do you think are aware of and versed in W3C web standards?
I'd say less than 1%. Of these, I'd say less than 1% understand why web standards are important to website accessibility.

2. Why do you think it appears so few professional web designers/developers are familiar with W3C web standards?
Universities, colleges, technical institutes, training centers etc... Seems like very very few students are taught W3C web standards and why they are important.

3. Why do companies design IE-only or IE-optimized websites?
Since it seems very very few web designers/developers are versed in W3C web standards, most companies do not have the resources to build standards compliant websites. They probably do not feel that the percentage of those who don't use Internet Explorer is significant enough to worry about.

4. Do you think website authoring tools are a part of the problem?
Yes. The tools out there should make it easy to produce standards compliant websites, at least as easy as it is to produce Internet Explorer compliant websites.

5. Do you think Microsoft dropping support for Internet Explorer on the Mac is a good thing?
Yes. Macintosh users will now be faced with dealing with IE-only or IE-optimized websites just like Linux users. Some of these users will add to the base of people who advocate W3C web standards.

6. What percentage of the public do you think cares about W3C web standards?
Those that cannot or do not want to use Internet Explorer are probably more likely to care about W3C web standards. However, they would have to experience an important IE-only website that they need to use, like their bank, for them to care enough about it.

7. What do you think the solution is?
I don't know if there is a solution but if there is one, at the very least, it has to start in the universities and colleges. Students should be trained in the essentials of W3C web standards and why they are important to website accessibility. Students should be taught that the Web is meant for anyone anywhere to access and share information regardless of the platform or web browser they use.

[raublekick]

As someone who worked in the professional web field, I can provide some answers.

I'd say most people know of the W3C standards these days, but that's not why people don't use them. Lots of people are trained in the arts of table-based design. It's really hard to effectively switch. When I worked at my job, I tried to make a template with all CSS stuff, and I realized it would take me way to long to figure out how to get it working right.

Which brings me to another point: the project management. They are the ones who probably don't know, and most likely don't care, about the technical details of how a site is developed. They are there to schedule things out and make sure you are working on projects in a timely manner.

My next point is from the client point of view. Most of the PR people really don't give a rip, just like the project managers. The PR people are there to make deals, get hooked up with the best clients, etc... When a company wants a site, what they really want is an ad. You can't make very flashy ads with W3C standards.

Once you start making flashy sites, you have to start manipulating what CSS and W3C standards are really meant for. The it becomes almost standards-compliant, but not quite.

The problem really isn't on the developer level. It's on the business level. All of the developers working for a web development company could feel the need to make fast loading, easily accesable sites. But that doesn't change the fact that their clients want glitz, and the project managers want what the clients want.

I think W3C standards and CSS driven design is great. I wish every site would use it. There's nothing I hate more than a flashy, hard to navigate site. But, who am I to tell a multi-billion dollar international corporation that their site design doesn't follow standards?

[dickohead]

1. Are you in the US? I'm in Australia, and anyone considered a "web developer" would be a fool to not use or at least know about web standards, I'd say that only about 1% of developers wouldn't be aware, but your point about the importance of web standards might be closer to the point, lots of people will use them, see the effects, but never understand why it's a better way to do things, either because they don't manually code the php/xhtml/css themselves, or because they do things via WYSIWYG approach, user friendly yes, but not very effective with standards!

2. I agree with the fact that no-one is teaching them, but yet again this is due to understanding. From a users point of view, using IE5-IE6 on a windows system, what's the difference between a site done to standards and one done with front page code and tables? Stuff all, which is why people don't see the point. But web designers and developers, more recently (last 3 years) have been taight the importance of them, and they must comply to standards based approaches, but standards don't always let you do what you want with the Web, so sometimes they need to be bypassed (especially when fixing quirks in ie '*html {}' anyone?)

3. Mostly this will be attributed to what they and their friends use, they've never even heard of firefox or opera, why do they care if there website looks good in every browser? Or maybe the developers are just getting old and boring, refusing to update their knowledge because they're know-it-alls?

4. Not so much the autoring tools, but the way in which they are used, it's much easier to insert a 3x3 table than type it out, but it's harder to insert a 3 column floating layout with div's and css, so people either type it out or use tables. Personally, all my web development is done in a syntax highlighting text editor, because it's faster than the likes of bluefish/quanta or dreamweaver. And i don't think there is such a thing as Internet Explorer compliance, IE will take anything and do it's best to represent it, IE is still built for the days when developers all wrote different code that was messy and never standards based, these days things have changed but IE hasn't.

5. Spot on.

6. To answer that I pose another question, what percentage of the population gives a crap whether a website uses JSP/PHP/ASP/ColdFusion/Ruby to serve them content, or whether their details are stored in a MySQL/Access/MSSQL/Oracle/PostGreSQL database? Stuff all people even know how these things work, let alone know enough to spot differences, it's a rather niche sector of people that go to their bank's(or other) website and say "idiots, can't even get a form to work in firefox" or "why would use a table for that menu" or "who builds sites for IE only?"

7. You're spot on there, it needs to start with the educators, they need to make themselves aware that we're building technology for today anymore, nor are we developing web pages that can be accessed only from computers, who knows how web pages and the internet will be accessed in 5 years time? No one, which is why we need to ensure that the accessibility of our websites does not diminish over time.

@raublekick: "But, who am I to tell a multi-billion dollar international corporation that their site design doesn't follow standards?"
So don't tell them that, tell them that their website is inaccessible to people who don't run Windows with Internet Explorer, these days people who run Windows and Internet Explorer are on the decline, as people get educated they switch, as people get sick of the viruses/spyware they switch and anyone who doesn't switch is either ignorant to the alternatives, stubborn or waiting for IE7.

[Stormy Eyes]

But, who am I to tell a multi-billion dollar international corporation that their site design doesn't follow standards?

You're somebody who knows better. They might not listen, but the fact that you are "just a geek" should not deter you from raising your voice and speaking the truth: that the site they want is not standards-compliant and therefore will not work in all browsers. If they choose to ignore the truth, it's up to them to deal with the consequences.

[Virogenesis]

1. What percentage of professional web designers/developers do you think are aware of and versed in W3C web standards?
Its very high the only people that don't are idiots who aren't professionals they just prey on the innocents that hire them that don't know any better.

2. Why do you think it appears so few professional web designers/developers are familiar with W3C web standards?
I wouldn't call them professionals I'd call them wanna bes if they don't know how a browser renders then they don't know what they are doing.

3. Why do companies design IE-only or IE-optimized websites?
Because small companies that hire these rogue traders know no better.
The fact that they don't want to know keeps them happy.

4. Do you think website authoring tools are a part of the problem?
Yes and No... its up to the person to learn the tools of the trade.

5. Do you think Microsoft dropping support for Internet Explorer on the Mac is a good thing?
Not really it didn't redender the same anyway

6. What percentage of the public do you think cares about W3C web standards?
Less than 2%

7. What do you think the solution is?
Colleges should try to teach the student correctly in the uk they thought us not to use tables but then they told us to make table based sites.
Standards need to be forced those that don't get fined.

[WildTangent]

(To the best of my knowledge) my sites follow standards. I made a few code hacks to my blog to bring it in line with XHTML 1.0 Transitional (just couldn't get strict, no matter how hard I tried), and my forums (run on punbb) came XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, which is nice :) I'd like to learn more about using CSS to define page layouts, and XHTML. Once I do, I'll finally make my homepage. Not wasting my time making an HTML 4.0 compatible site.

-Wild

[yuri6312]

more

i'd like more ...

[dickohead]

My websites too comply with web standards... mind you, learning Ruby is a sure a lot harder than learning XHTML/CSS was! If anyone has good tutorials I'd love a link or two!

My web pages are in my sig if you want to "borrow" some ideas or the like, or PM/Email me for the code etc.

[briancurtin]

I'd like to put out these questions to the community to find out what they think about them:

1. What percentage of professional web designers/developers do you think are aware of and versed in W3C web standards?
I'd say less than 1%. Of these, I'd say less than 1% understand why web standards are important to website accessibility.
im going to go out on a limb and say you are incredibly off here. a good portion of them know of the standards, and they know why they are important. now as far as adhering to the standards, that number isnt as great, but much greater than 1%

[raublekick]

You're somebody who knows better. They might not listen, but the fact that you are "just a geek" should not deter you from raising your voice and speaking the truth: that the site they want is not standards-compliant and therefore will not work in all browsers. If they choose to ignore the truth, it's up to them to deal with the consequences.

Even though I don't work there anymore, I will say that it is definitely not the best decision for someone like me to be telling a client about the pitfalls of their website. Not a good way to make your bosses happy.

Web development is a tricky area. With software languages like C/C++ or Python, you can write strict, clean code and still get exactly what you want. This is not the case on the web.

[kassetra]

The web is a unique media in that there are two converging disciplines involved in the creation of content - the designers and the developers.

Designers are traditionally involved in the graphic design, layout, formatting, and presentation of the content, whereas the Developers are traditionally programmers that have learned to code for a different audience.

In the juxtaposition of these two groups you have a clashing set of norms - the designers and their design standards and developers with their programming standards; the w3c standards have been trying to bridge the two for some time.

This effort, however, is sometimes thwarted by the demands of business/marketing (I can't tell you how many times I've been told exactly, pixel by pixel, where the brand identification is to be placed on every screen that every user could possibly ever see displaying the web site.)

Up until now, it hasn't been feasible to try and follow the w3c standards when the standards haven't been utilized the same way in all browsers - whereas other methods that were consistent across browser versions were.

Now, however, there are languages and tools available to let the designer do what they need (CSS, and unfortunately, to an extent, Flash), and languages and tools available to let the developer do what they need (Ruby, Python, etc.) - without the two of them at odds with one another.

With the availability of *both* the Designer Tools *and* the Developer Tools to effectively separate the jobs cleanly - I think many of the barriers to creating w3c standardized sites have been lowered extensively.

The next step (which is already happening) is the transition from the "Pages That Work But Aren't Following Standards" to "Pages That Work Because They Are Standardized." This transition will happen much faster IF IE7 happens to support the w3c standards similar to the way that other browsers do (or other browsers attempt to emulate whatever model that IE7 happens to use.)

That is the key - browser support. I know from experience that on some sites, I simply do not have the resources (time, usually) available to make sure that the standards-compliant site I have just developed has been properly safeguarded against all of the non-standardized display rendering in IE.

We can be aware and versed in standards all we like - but until the browser that has a lion's share of the market renders them correctly, designers and developers alike will be forced to use "whatever means necessary" to get the job done.

[TechSonic]

My web site is W3C standards. But it still looks like scrambled crap in Opera, where Mozilla and IE show it just fine. Opera sucks no??

[Derek Djons]

1. What percentage of professional web designers/developers do you think are aware of and versed in W3C web standards?
I'd say less than 1%. Of these, I'd say less than 1% understand why web standards are important to website accessibility.

I don't know the percentage but I can definitelly see that things are changing. Don't forget that there is still a large group of people who learned it an other way. These people are comfort with their way. But the next generation webdevelopers certainly loves the W3C. There actually isn't a reason why W3C should not be used. It has a lot of advantages.

2. Why do you think it appears so few professional web designers/developers are familiar with W3C web standards?
Universities, colleges, technical institutes, training centers etc... Seems like very very few students are taught W3C web standards and why they are important.

As I said. The current generation has been thaught an other way. But I don't agree with concerning the professional branch. In fact a lot of professional webdesign companies are using W3C. Professional companies are always on the lookout for new methods and techniques. It are the small "professional" companies which just do it for a hobby or earn some money with it.

3. Why do companies design IE-only or IE-optimized websites?
Since it seems very very few web designers/developers are versed in W3C web standards, most companies do not have the resources to build standards compliant websites. They probably do not feel that the percentage of those who don't use Internet Explorer is significant enough to worry about.

This is very simple. Tough other browsers such as Firefox are gaining more terrain Internet Explorer is still the world standard. I personally think this is going to change in the future. Already at school (almost two years ago) teachers learned us xhtml, css and javascript while using Firefox as our primary browser.

4. Do you think website authoring tools are a part of the problem?
Yes. The tools out there should make it easy to produce standards compliant websites, at least as easy as it is to produce Internet Explorer compliant websites.

No I don't think tools are the problems. If we look at the market for these tools we hardly see any WYSIWYG and or tools for dummies. A lot of professional webdesigners build from scratch and often build highly customized websites with (complex) application in them.

5. Do you think Microsoft dropping support for Internet Explorer on the Mac is a good thing?
Yes. Macintosh users will now be faced with dealing with IE-only or IE-optimized websites just like Linux users. Some of these users will add to the base of people who advocate W3C web standards.

Just I as I said before: "I think that this problem is changing." I think Microsoft is realizing that other browsers are becoming compatible one or the other way and this will make IE not a necessary item.

6. What percentage of the public do you think cares about W3C web standards?
Those that cannot or do not want to use Internet Explorer are probably more likely to care about W3C web standards. However, they would have to experience an important IE-only website that they need to use, like their bank, for them to care enough about it.

End user in my opinion don't give a nickle about it all and they even don't know what the W3C logo is all about. For normal people understanding W3C and the code behind a website is like abracadabra.

7. What do you think the solution is?
I don't know if there is a solution but if there is one, at the very least, it has to start in the universities and colleges. Students should be trained in the essentials of W3C web standards and why they are important to website accessibility. Students should be taught that the Web is meant for anyone anywhere to access and share information regardless of the platform or web browser they use.

Well, you've mentioned a solution which already is in progress. As I mentioned before at my school we were learned webdevelopment with W3C and Firefox. And I know this is going on not only at my school but on almost every webdevelopment / digital communications related college and university.

[egon spengler]

1. What percentage of professional web designers/developers do you think are aware of and versed in W3C web standards?
Its very high the only people that don't are idiots who aren't professionals they just prey on the innocents that hire them that don't know any better.



I'm sure it is higher than 1% but unfortunately I'm not sure if it's very high yet. I recently looked over a few portfolios of applicants for a web developer role at a company I used to work for and of the ones they sent my there was little to no use of css (at most it was used for background & color) and they all used table based layouts. I'm not really evangelical about css and although personally I never use tables I recognise that sometimes tables can be easier, these were all very simple two or column layouts though and were all riddled with tables. Some of them even had a table just to display a single img. Bear in mind these were some of the better applicants.

I think sometimes if you're in the "world" of standards based design you might forget that a whole other world exists out there. I know that I did

[Kerberos]

I think Virogenesis has it right. I do web design for a living (among other things) and the problem is any idiot with a copy of Frontpage advertises themselves as a 'Professional Web Designer'. There are no real courses as the technology itself is so new and still developing and most of what you have to learn is in implementation (such as how to avoid IE bugs) which is more practice than 'do this course and your a pro'. I have to compete competitivley against complete novices and it gets hard to justify to the client why I charge what I charge when someone can do them a full site _with flash_ for £100. Its frustrating.

CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com) is what convinced me to drop table based layouts and focus entirely on XHTML + CSS - it was a bit of work at first but I would never go back to table layouts as they are a maintainance nightmare, horrible to code and just plain wrong.

The beauty of CSS is the graphics are entirely seperate from the code so you can change a sites entire look, create a print friendly version or even a seperate stylesheet that will render it properly on a mobile phone/pda without all the glitz - if you wanted to do that with plain HTML you'd be looking at a site rewrite for each version.

The bottom line is if you use table based layouts, and fail to adhere to w3c specs then you can't call yourself a professional. Its just unfortunate that HTML, unlike code, will run without being valid.

[ember]

I nearly completely agree with Kassetra (except for I usually take the time to make the page look good in IE, too).

I recently talked to a design student (I work on a project at the State University of Design Karlsruhe) and he was very astonished that blind tables and 1-pixel transparent gifs are not state of the art any longer.

I guess, designers and artist will only start using CSS and standard compliant (X)HTML when:
a) IE7 is out and has almost complete support for CSS/CSS2
b) Professional tools like Dreamweaver start producing (X)HTML+CSS-Code instead of mere table layout.

[Stormy Eyes]

Even though I don't work there anymore, I will say that it is definitely not the best decision for someone like me to be telling a client about the pitfalls of their website. Not a good way to make your bosses happy.

Did I say anything about telling the client? Hell no. We're technicians. We don't tell the clients a damned thing unless we have to; that's what management is for.

Tell your bosses, and let them deal with the client. If they don't give a **** about standards, then promote standards-compliance on your own time.

[Kerberos]

I guess, designers and artist will only start using CSS and standard compliant (X)HTML when:
a) IE7 is out and has almost complete support for CSS/CSS2
b) Professional tools like Dreamweaver start producing (X)HTML+CSS-Code instead of mere table layout.
I still code with backward compatibility to IE5.5 and IE5.0 so it will be a very long time before the userbase on IE6 hits a point where it can be safely ignored. Thats assuming Microsoft can get their CSS support to be standards compliant and not broken in some horrible yet subtle way as is the case with just about everything in IE.

On the plus side I've got it on a few sites so if it detects IE 5.0 or less it just doesn't load the CSS. It looks as basic as it gets, but at least its functional.

[raublekick]

Did I say anything about telling the client? Hell no. We're technicians. We don't tell the clients a damned thing unless we have to; that's what management is for.

Tell your bosses, and let them deal with the client. If they don't give a **** about standards, then promote standards-compliance on your own time.

Ok I gotcha. I did do that to some degree. In all honesty at my job as a web programmer I was really just a paid part-time intern, but I did more than just the bullcrap work. I worked on HTML templates at first, and then did some ColdFusion work to expand some sites. When I was doing the HTML templates I really studied CSS, and tried to use it as much as possible, even if I was using it inline. And I quietly promoted it just by asking lots of questions about it, it got the other developers interested to some degree.

About IE7, Kerberos is right. Most people will only get IE7 when they get Vista, and most people won't get Vista for quite some time considering there are still people happily running 98.

[dickohead]

My web site is W3C standards. But it still looks like scrambled crap in Opera, where Mozilla and IE show it just fine. Opera sucks no??

Hahahaha, the age old Opera's a **** argument. One common problem with Opera vs Firefox is with measurments and where they are used... for example:

You have a DIV that sits 10 pixels from the edge of your screen in firefox, using "#DIV.name {margin-left: 10px}" in opera (classically) it would still sit on the edge of the screen, but if you applied a: "body {margin-left: 10px}" it would be 10px from the edge, but then in firefox it would be 20!!!

NIGHTMARE!!!

I think it was resolved, but Opera does still render paddings/margins differently to IE and Firefox. While Firefox does seem to do everything better in relation to standards and the Box Model, Opera isn't too far behind. But mostly the problems with CSS for Opera will be related to padding/margin confusion and where those paddings/margins are applied.

[imagine]

but Opera does still render paddings/margins differently to IE and Firefox.It doesn't render them differently, it just has a different default browser style sheet, and that's perfectly fine. If you want to make sure an element has absolutely no padding then specify that.
{ padding: 0; }

Web developers make all kind of strange assumptions of how default style sheets of the users or their browsers look like. If you ever tried to surf the web with a default black background and white font colour you know what I'm talking about.


7. What do you think the solution is?I think much more important than learning the correct syntax is to learn that (X)HTML/CSS is a language designed to fit the needs of the recipient, the reader, the user and not the wishes of the authour. In this regard it's the opposite of PDF.
And as mentioned above, especially people coming from print design seem to have serious trouble to understand that.

Standard compliant code - from a syntactical point of view - is a simple matter of dumping the tag soup and using XHTML. XHTML is a XML dialect and therefore a tree. If you omit a > from a node of the tree, then it's no tree anymore to the parser, but unreadable garbage. Unfortunately XHTML cannot be used in many cases yet, because no version of Internet Explorer has a render engine for it. But that will change.

[nemik]

i care. they make sense and help people and developers of browsers. i do nothing for IE.

my side-business company produces a 'niche' enough product that we can tell people what to use. I code and test in firefox and tell my customers to use that. if they use IE, i tell them i can't and won't guarantee that anything will work. many of them end up switching.
in fact, if they log in with IE, a warning in big bold red font tells them IE is not standards-compatible and not guaranteed to work with the service. this does a good job too. :)

[blastus]

Hey everyone, thanks for the informative responses! It seems like the consensus is that web designers/developers (at least the "professional" ones) are aware of, and proficient in using/applying W3C standards, but, for one reason or another, still end up producing websites that either only render in IE or are "best" viewable/suitable in IE. Whether this is the result of a lack of education/experience, a lack of management that understands the importance of W3C standards, a lack of suitable standards, company policy, or some other reason, I hope that the practice of producing public websites that only work in one browser, to the exclusion of all others, eventually dies out.

There are plenty of reasons nowadays for companies to adopt W3C standards, perhaps not 100% strictly, but at least to the extent that their public websites function decently in a standards-compliant web browser. I support W3C standards because I believe that the Web was meant to be accessible to anyone regardless of the platform OS they use, regardless of the web browser they use, and regardless of any disabilities they may have. I believe the world-wide adoption and promotion of W3C standards helps facilitate this cause.

[Malphas]

Add me to the list of people that think the statistics are much much higher than 1%, I'd guess that the majority of professional web designers are following standards, and non-standard pages being primarily the work of amatuers and semi-professionals. And I don't agree with the above consensus either, but then we're all viewing different pages so it's hard to say, I rarely come across a site that looks better in IE and don't ever recall finding a site that would only render in IE.

I don't think a solution is necessary, IE has lost market share and standards are becoming increasingly important and recognised as a result.


My web site is W3C standards. But it still looks like scrambled crap in Opera, where Mozilla and IE show it just fine. Opera sucks no??
No, Opera is just less forgiving (although that's subjective, technically it just uses different default values) than Firefox and IE, chances are it's your code that's at fault. Like imagine said you probably failed to specify something because it looked fine in IE and Firefox and then assumed Opera would use the same values.