Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

In my last post I discussed a particular web design company’s lack of standards compliance and broke down, why I thought that, although they were cheap, they didn’t offer value for money. This time, I’m going to look at the same issue but from the other side. As a designer, you want to give your client the best but at the same time you don’t want to sell yourself short. Of course there are standards that, no matter what the project, you need to stick to… text alternatives to images, always declaring a doctype, these are fundamentals. But published guidelines can get very very picky and sticking to them 100%… well, it can be a bitch. How far is it feasible to take it?

When I say published guidelines, I’m talking primarily about the W3C’s validation rules and accessibility guidelines like WCAG and WAI. Obviously there are unwritten standards like using semantic HTML (Using the most meaningful tags for the content to which they apply such as using <em> for emphasis and not <i> for italic and vice-versa) that are there as sort of best practices and it’s great to follow them but the written guidelines are much harder to ignore, especially when some of them, namely the accessibility ones, are becoming more and more of a legal requirement. But legal requirement or not, I learned a while ago that sticking to the WCAG/WAI guidelines too closely can actually harm a site’s accessibility! But that’s not the only way that being too anal about guidelines can harm a project. As I said in my last post; time in web design is money and chasing difficult solutions to unmet guidelines that, in the grand scheme of things, might not be all that important can be a costly business.

I think of this as a sort of three-way balancing act. You want to provide the best standards but you also want to provide a visually stunning site. Some of these stunning features might not meet every facet of the guidelines. At the same time as this you have time constraints. So, that said I think the most successful sites are ones that have pulled of this balancing act the best. Fail in any one of those three areas and your project takes a serious hit.

I have people that disagree with me but I think an example of a site that is performing the balancing act pretty well is Carsonified. It uses WordPress so development is speedy, it looks pretty nice and, although it does have a few more validation errors than I’d like to have on a site, it performs better than the majority in that department. The only thing I reckon that they could make a marked improvement on would be accessibility guidelines. Another great example is Jason Santa Maria’s blog. Again, this is built on a blogging platform for speed, It looks great and performs extremely well as far as validation goes. What’s more is that, because it’s a typography based site with few graphics, it’s pretty accessible too.

But my, limited, experience is no great authority on these matters so I thought I’d ask some designers who claim to be “standards based” about what they thought. This is what i said:

Do you think it is possible to be *too* strict on these
standards and guidelines? When should you say “Enough is enough.” and
strive towards a well rounded overall project rather than it complying
to standards and validation 100%?

Seeing as I’ve used one of his sites as an example, I thought one of the best people to ask would be former Carsonite, Elliot Jay Stocks. He’s extremely highly thought of in web design circles and his client list resembles the bastard love child of a who’s who in music and a big stack of £100 notes. One thing is certain, he makes some visually stunning sites. But he’s also, by his own admission a standards based designer. Here’s what he had to say:

“There are two instances of this that really bug me:

1) When some noob kid calls you out on your site not validating, like validation is the be-all-and-end-all. You can still build a site entirely with tables and text-in-images and yet still validate; validation has little or nothing to do with Web Standards awareness.

2) When accessibility-focused clients are unwilling to budge and force lovely designs to become boring, Granny-friendly blocks of blandness. I had this happen to some of my work recently and it was utterly soul-destroying. As a result I’m refusing to do any more work for the client and won’t be putting the work in my portfolio.”

- Elliot Jay Stocks

For that first point to not sound waaaay controversial we need to step back and look as what Validation actually means. Validation is a basic check of the markup. It checks that all your tags are closed properly, that you’ve not got any dodgy double spaces or double characters (a sort of markup spell checker) and that all the tags you use are allowed in whatever doctype you are claiming. It also makes sure you include any attributes that are required and that you haven’t put any attributes in that aren’t allowed. For example it tells you off if you don’t put alt attributes on your images. The validator doesn’t check web standards, however. It doesn’t see if you’re using tables for layout (wrong) or if you’re using them to display the contents of your online shop in a grid view (right). It doesn’t see that you’ve bunched together a load of <a> tags to form your navigation rather than putting it all neatly in a <ul> which is the accepted standard. In short, it tells you if there are any mega-blocks in your Lego house… and that’s about it. It doesn’t speculate on the quality of your building.

“I believe the validator is a debugging tool, not a measure of greatness.”

- Jeff Croft

But the odd mega-block doesn’t necessarily mean your lego house is going to fall apart. The pieces will fit together and often, if built in a strong structure, will work just as well as an all-lego house. That’s where standards come in to play. What web standards do is make sure the structure is solid and using the best practices. So what I’m saying is, and what Elliot Jay Stocks is getting at, is as long as you ensure that your site doesn’t break apart in different browsers or cause screen readers to go “wtf?” and is easily usable by using best practices (Web Standards) then it’s not worth busting your chops and jeopardising the profitability or success of a project just to make sure all your Lego is really Lego.

As for his second point… Well, when you’re as successful as Mr. Stocks it becomes easier to turn down work that you don’t particularly like to do. As for the rest of us mere mortals we kind of need to take whatever we can get to keep the lights on and the phone connected. But it does answer my question pretty well, in a round-about sort of way. What that statement says is that, with accessibility, you are at the mercy of your client to a much greater extent than you are with validation. If your client wants it, then you’d damn well better put a wheelchair ramp on that Lego and Mega-Block house.

But what if your client doesn’t specify any special accessibility needs? How far should you take it then? Well to be honest, I don’t think you need to do all that much. Basic accessibility checks should be carried out such as making sure that everything that isn’t text has a text alternative so blind people can use the site and making sure text colour contrasts well against the background colour but you don’t have to go for balls-to-the-wall WAI-AAA standards. So set yourself some minimum requirements and stick to them. Then, if you have some time spare, maybe work on some of the more advanced ones but don’t bust your balls on those if the client hasn’t specifically asked for it. I’ve seen web designers do projects where they attempt to satisfy all accessibility guidelines all the way up to WAI-AAA and this is fine as a coding exercise. I mean, if you can do it then hats off to you. In practice, however it leads to two negatives; 1. The site takes double the time (at least) to build and test. 2. No matter how hard you try, chances are the design is not going to look nearly as nice as a design where there are less accessibility constraints.

Jeff Croft takes the argument 14 steps further in his recent tirade and suggests that he’s “done” with caring about standards all together because they’ve become too ridiculous and he’s able to think for himself well enough to decide how to build websites and doesn’t need to be told how, when and where by stuffy anal retentive guidelines. It’s a ballsy statement. But this doesn’t mean that you should totally ignore these guidelines from the get-go. I still believe that, for beginners the validator, in particular, is an extremely valuable tool. It doesn’t force you to make good websites but it does make sure you don’t make mistakes in syntax and the like. This, I suppose, brings me to my closing opinion. How much should you follow the guidelines and standards? As much as makes sense to do so for the benefit of yourself, your clients and users. No more, no less. It’s the only way to give the client what they paid for while not ripping yourself off.