Philadelphia Standards Organization

Any good, upstanding web nerd knows Tim Berners-Lee. Recently he was interviewed by the British Computer Society. Berners-Lee makes some very good points about the state of the web and the direction its heading. Most of all he captures the essence of what has been discussed at several of the PSO meetings when asked about professionalism in IT.

When it comes to professionalism as a general topic there are important things to talk about and it makes sense to talk about being professional in IT. This may be a biased point of view, but standards are vital so that IT professionals can provide systems that last.

Customers need to be given control of their own data - not being tied into a certain manufacturer so that when there are problems they are always obliged to go back to them. IT professionals have a responsibility to understand the use of standards and the importance of making Web applications that work with any kind of device.

They need to take the view that data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

This point drives home the fact that Web Standards and best practices as a whole are more than just the trendy way to design. This idea is the driving force behind efforts like microformats. Web Standards provide us with a means of sharing information and proliferating it into the future.

Lastest Buzz from the Web Standards project says that the The US National Federation of the Blind has been filed a lawsuit against Target for the inaccessibility of their website. This is big. Although there is legislation which addresses the need to address accessibility on the web, it is not enforced. This lawsuit could bring about the beginning of the end of inaccessible websites. If Target is forced to fix their broken website, a lot of organizations will surely follow.

What’s big about this is that for those of us who have been evangelising standards and accessibility for years, we are armed with the skills to manage the demand when it comes. The problem is that skills aren’t always enough. You may be able to walk the walk but you need to be able to talk the talk. Accessibility can mean a variety of things and the message needs to be clear when you deliver it.

Christian Heilmann has written three articles on Digital Web which may prove to be helpful in developing your own version of the message which are worth a read. The first article, 10 Reasons Clients Don’t Care About Accessibility, brings several good points about why organizations don’t care about accessibilty issues. These may help you develop your own reasons why they should. Internalizing these points can help the Standards evangelist in all of us prepare for the accessibility conversation.

Heilmann’s second piece is a two part article discussing Seven Accessibility Mistakes (part 2). All seven points he makes in this article are important to the idea of accessiblity. Something which caught my eye though was at the end of Seven Accessibility Mistakes Part 2 when he writes, Start a catalogue of success stories of user-centered design for all your projects. You might be able to implement one bit in each of those and assemble a good portfolio to show new prospects in the future. This is equally important when it comes to evangelising accessibility and standards because people love to follow in the footsteps of success.

The point here is that although talking to clients about accessibilty is akin to talking to your kids about sex, if you are prepared for the conversation it will be easier. Knowing why a client should, or should not, implement a particular feature or trick on their site before the conversation arises will help you to avert the crisis.

Will makes an interesting point in his blog post about using browser-specific CSS and still having webpages validate. His quandry:

Have you ever been tempted to use a CSS property such as -moz-border-radius, but can’t stand the thought of having a page that refuses to validate?

He can’t add it to an external stylesheet through <link>, nor can he use it internally within <style>; if he does, neither will validate.

However, adding the proprietary CSS to a style attribute on an element gets around the problem, since the W3C HTML validator does not check the validity of CSS within style attributes.

Observe; the code below uses the -moz-border-radius, but the resulting HTML will still validate.

The code:

<div style=\"padding: 0.25em 0.5em;
   border: 2px solid #605953;
   -moz-border-radius: 25px;
   background: #f1efec;\">
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
</div>

The result:

On the one hand, it’s a neat trick (not necessarily a hack) that gets around the validator and allows a developer to use non-standard styles on his page. On the other hand, that’s exactly it: it’s non-standard; and I agree whole-heartedly with Will, who so colorfully elucidates:

Yeah, it is kind of an ugly method, but you shouldn’t care since if you’re going to use it, right? After all, depending on proprietary CSS is like depending on a rotten wood catwalk over a tank full of the proverbial kind of bovine fecal matter.

All of the above got my brain thinking about validation and standards.

The W3C Validators are not the end-all-be-all definitive sources for creating standards-based websites. As Will (and now I) have successfully pointed out, proprietary (and, in most cases, non-standard, non-valid) code can be “smuggled” into a website and can trick the validators into thinking the code is perfectly valid.

The point is that standards are about much more than just validation. They are also about what works for you. You may have a certain work ethic, i.e. a personal standard, that no one else has heard of, let alone uses for himself. Does that make your work ethic any less valid? Pft. Of course not.

Any Joe with an Internet connection and a text editor can create a page that validates and claim it’s “standards-compliant”. As Mike Davidson wrote almost twenty months ago:

Web standards are about all the processes involved in publishing information over IP. […] Just because you can validate your code doesn’t mean you are better than anybody else. Heck, it doesn’t even necessarily mean you write better code than anybody else. […] Spewing validation manifestos on message boards isn’t going to show you how to listen, negotiate, compromise, and execute.

Web developers have been told to ensure that the sites they build are operable with browsers which rival Internet Explorer. This includes open-source heroes Firefox and Apple’s Safari. Deri Jones of SciVisum explains their reasoning and has the XiTI metrics to back it up:

Jones advised web developers to develop code around the W3C’s Cascading Style Sheets 2 specification, which simplifies site development by separating content and presentation, and makes sites more accessible to disabled people. “Those that stick to standards have much more reliable, stable and fast web sites,” Jones argued. “They should keep it simple, and [taking into consideration] accessibility issues also improves the performance of web sites.”

Taken from StraightUpSearch, yet another reason to get on the Standards Bus:

“Why should my corporation care what the page markup looks like? Because search engines do. They care so much that they have dedicated teams of programmers who do nothing but define meaning between elements on a page, developing algorithms to assign rank and value to each and every element of each and every page on the internet … the real value of web standards for businesses comes in the form of search engine results pages.”

The most common discussion when it comes to standards is about how you convince your boss or company that standards are the right way to go. There are a million good articles around the Internet about why standards are hot. There are just as many standards junkies working for organizations that can’t see the benefits. The goal of your average standards advocate is obviously to get their clients or organizations to switch to a standards approach. There is unfortunately no way to get them all at once.

Brian McElaney is a Combat Correspondent for the U.S. Marine Corp. He’s stationed in the horn of Africa where he takes part in humanitarian missions. Among his many other duties, he is responsible for maintaining the Combined Joint Task Force website. After his launch he put out a call to all Nerd-dom to help him critique the site. He is attempting to make the site as standards compliant as possible. He chose to use the very forgiving HTML Transitional schema for the site because someday he will turn it over to someone else with no web experience.

In a government which mandates the use of Internet Explorer, and rarely uses web standards when they build their sites, people like Brian become more and more integral in the standards movement. Organizations and branches of the government are won over one at a time. Large organizations like ESPN who have embraced web standards help the effort significantly but its the evangelism of the individuals building new sites or rebuilding old sites that help the movement the most.

I frequently get information for our site at work in an Excel file. This leaves me with two options. The first is to save as HTML and wade through hours of trash markup. It’s no secret that Microsoft Office documents saved as web pages create messy markup. This is tedious and takes forever. The second is to copy and paste into a text file and add my own markup. This option isn’t much better. It takes equally as long and there is a good chance you’re going to miss tags throughout the document.

There is a feature in Dreamweaver though that can help turn an ginormous task into a teeny one. Export your Excel spreadsheet as a comma delimited file. Then back in Dreamweaver select Insert -> Table Objects -> Import Tabular Data. Then you’ll select the delimited file. There will probably be some amount of column removing and row deleting. In the end you have a cleanly, and more importantly, quickly, marked up table.

Combine this with some CSS and a nice DOM script like Splintered Striper and you have an attractive, easily updated HTML table. This comes in handy if it’s information that is modified frequently.

Firefox 1.5 is out and I can say, it is a great improvement. It’s faster, the friendlier error messages are real nice, and all the extras make it a great reason to upgrade from Version 1.06.

Firefox is also having an “open source” ad campaign, sort of like the Apple “Switch” campaign. They are allowing Firefox users to submit a 30 second advertising clip praising the wondrous Firefox browser. I personally think that this is not worth Firefox’s time and will actually help in the downfall of the product. How, you ask? Let me explain.

The Apple “Switch” Campaign worked to revive the image of the Macintosh. It drug Apple out from the edge of bankruptcy and took it to an estimated 5-10% of the market share. Of course no one really recognizes that this was done mostly on Microsoft’s dime. Bill Gates helped fund Apple to get it out of its hole. If Apple would have gone bankrupt, the FTC would have definitely broken Microsoft up for good. Knowing this, Bill Gates helped get Apple on its feet and saved both Microsoft and Apple.

Firefox is trying the same type of campaign strategy. Go for the home user base. Show home users that people just like them are using Firefox and they will jump on the Mozilla bandwagon. I find this a flawed campaign plan.

The “Switch” campaign worked wonderfully for home users with Apple, but that’s because the Apple hardware became a piece of the décor in your house. It looked nice on that Ikea desk next to that Herman Miller chair. While most Windows machines were old white boxes that looked the same no matter which brand you bought, Apple offered a beautiful and well designed alternative. Firefox is not beautiful hardware and the average home user keeps their default setting intact. That is why IE is still the #1 browser used, even though it is far inferior.

Where Firefox is going wrong is that they are targeting the home user. Why not target the larger corporation while you have a competitive advantage? Firefox is more secure than IE. Since I made the switch, I haven’t had one piece of Spy-ware installed on my machine through the browser. With my array of extensions that I have installed into Firefox, I find my browsing more precise and I find information quicker and easier. I personally think Firefox should go after the IT Professionals that actually make the decisions for their companies.

If the Firefox organization can manage to get a large corporations IT department to convert 100% to Firefox, that would tip the first domino in a chain reaction. Sell IT Departments on the fact that Firefox is more secure. Sell them on the fact that it’s simpler to use. This would mean less IT time fixing peoples issue and more time doing real IT work. Consumers tend to use the software at home that they use at work. If a large corporation of 100,000 people switch to Firefox, then that could possibly mean 200,000 new users. One install on the desktop of work and one on the desktop at home. With Firefox’s current campaign, they are switching 1 user at a time. At that rate, they are headed for certain doom. Firefox has one major obstacle that will destroy it permanently and that is Google buying Opera.

This rumor has been spreading like a wild fire in an old forest. Google plans on buying the Opera Browser. If this happens, Firefox can kiss their browser good bye. Both Firefox and Microsoft must fear this immensely. Opera is usually rated the #1 in browser quality year after year. It works on Macintosh, Windows, Linux, PDA’s and Cell phones. Its market infiltration will take the web by storm. It handles Web, Email, and RSS aggregation. Opera combined with Google Talk, Gmail, and Google Desktop capabilities could create an all in one product that would dominate the market place.

I predict within the first 6 months of Google releasing the Google Opera browser, Google will own 25% of the browser market share. This will drop Firefox to about 5% and Microsoft to about 60%. With in 2 years of the release, Google Opera could possible become the majority browser.

So it’s undeniable that Firefox is doomed. I love the browser and will use it until the end, but that end might be sooner than later. Unless Yahoo! buys Firefox, then it’s a whole new ball game.

I’ve been reading 24 Ways to impress your friends for about two weeks. It’s a site from Drew McClellan.

Each day from now until 24th December, we’ll be publishing a new short article or tip designed to teach you something that perhaps you didn’t know, and in turn can share with your friends. It’s a holiday thing – share the lovin’.

There have been several articles that helped me grasp a few concepts that I was having some trouble with. In fact, Drew explained ems three days before Eric Meyer did it at An Event Apart. As I write this, there are thirteen articles, but when its done it looks like it will serve as either a nice crash course or a sweet refresher on a bunch of very important standards related topics.

Take a look at my favorites or read the whole site. Either way, your friends will be so impressed.

• Centered Tabs with CSS
• Transitional vs. Strict Markup
• The Attribute Selector for Fun and (no ad) Profit
• DOM Scripting Your Way to Better Blockquotes