The beautiful thing about standards is there are so many to chose from ๐
I recently posted a entry taking to task what I consider the blind zealots that infest the web world. The kind of people who think anyone who dares use a table for page layout is an idiot and should be shot. You know the ones, the fools who will tell you for hours and hours how important it is to work on every device from the abacus to a [[e2:HAL 9000]] so you don’t exclude .0001% of the population and then say you shouldn’t support internet explorer (90+%) to teach “them” a “lesson”.
Anyway, a guy who hangs out in the Girl2 chatroom commented on the entry and made some good points. I want to take a second to respond to his post and one of the comments.
Contention: “The web must be accessible to as many people as possible, irregardless of thier connection speed, display methodology, handicaps or input methods.”
I disagree. The web should be accessible where practical to those who are impaired if such a concern is relevant to the content.
We live in a universe that contains experiences that do not apply to the impaired. For instance I am seriously red/green [[wp:color blind]] and many works of art are thus impossible for me to appreciate fully. Further, many military tasks are not within my ability set, nor is flying a commercial airliner. The paralyzed cannot ski as would someone without that disability. Those whoa re deaf do not experience music as we do.
Shall we then make sure that all music is full accessible to anyone, without regard to disability or the equipment they are using? How would we do that? We could limit all music to deep base for instance. And we could not use stereo because someone with a crystal AM radio from the 1970 might not be able to pick it up – oh, wait, FM is out too… stick to AM.
Should I, then, not build a sports car because someone without legs can’t drive it? Maybe we should no longer make movies because those who are blind cannot see them in all their glory.
Of course not. And it gets even sillier to have this be a moral requirement when someone is doing something for themselves or their own enjoyment.
When possible you make the experiences you produce as accessible as you can. You put wheelchair ramps in theatres so that those who cannot walk can attend but you do NOT get rid of good film-making so that the blind don’t feel left out.
When I am distributing census data or political opinion in text form I should make it work for everyone. When I am by definition delivering designed multimedia content that depends on many of its properties to be effective to the target audience (large or small) it is not necessary to dumb that experience down so that someone who has a 80×24 line text terminal on a 300 baud phone line and who is deaf and paralyzed can experience it.
Contention: “websites MUST be accessible to the mobile market”
Sort of. Must is way too strong a term here. I would say it makes sense for most sites to have some of their content accessible to the mobile market. Of course, as I mention later on that isn’t really ever going to happen the way the standards people seem to think ๐
Contention: “Websites need, also, to have an eye towards maintainability.”
I agree. This doesn’t have anything to do with CSS< fluid design or handicap accessibility. I have done some great maintainable websites that are entirely in Flash.
Contention: “Standards promote less buggy programs, more feature rich applications, and smoother times for all. To not follow standards is uncool – who remembers “Layer” tags with netscape? yea.”
A good standard is good for everyone. A bad one is just as useless as anything else that sucks. In fact, innovation >requires< many times that standards be broken or extended.
Let’s take the <Layer> tag introduced by netscape. Was it “non standard”? Sure. Kind of ๐ See, the tag itself was compliant with the [[wp:SGML]] standard that [[wp:HTML]] is built on. Further, since HTML allows for new tages to be introduced (a browser ignores them) the layer tag wasn’t even so bad. The introduction of Layer was an innovation, it transformed how some of us designed for the web and made many cool things possible – and it was the signpost that eventually led us to [[wp:DHTML]].
Innovation often involves the bending of breaking of “standards”.
The trick is to use the appropriate standards when one exists.
Contention (From comments): “The last five to ten years I’ve watched more and more people slip into presentation focus mode. That’s because they are idiots.”
I disagree. I think what we are learning is that presentation can be part of the thing you deliver. Again, if I am delivering access to a simple database then I don’t need to consider presentation… but if I am delivering rich content or a game or a training course or a product demo and so on then presentation is also useful. Design is not the bastard stepchild of the incompetent you know, it turns out presentation and design can shape perception and experience. Controlling my presentation – or having a preferred one, is good.
Presentation is the informational equivalent of body language. While something like [[wp:RSS]] can provide you with my words, the manner of my presentation imparts to you something more about my style and personality. Stripping all content of presentation and then expecting to understand it deeply woudl be like thinking you got the full experience from the text of a great orator and this did not need to hear him speak.
Further, many many users do not have the skills or desire to learn the skills needed to forge new and custom presentations all the time. So far from making design more flexible you will by default make it more rigid. The “design” most would see will then be the default presentation supplied with their aggregator.
Not all information needs this, and where possible and useful access to the underlying data (XML, SOAP and so on) should be available of course… but the contention that those who realize that presentation (design) is in and of itself part of the message is incorrect.
See, the problem here is making sweeping statements and judgments. Of course there are lots of other problems to all this, and some of them stem from the feeble skills of those who write the standards sometimes.
The other flaw is the thinking that there is, in fact, a deep conflict. Other than the zealots there is not. See as a designer, artist and author (creator of experiences) I will not want to dumb down my presentations ot hat it worked on all devices. I will pick those formats that make the most sense and optimize my presentation for them.
Take Girl2 again as an example. I could use some style sheet tricks to put it onto a mobile phone or Palm Pilot – but while readable it would look like crap. It would lack style and flow. Rather than compromise my web interface and still wind up with a crap phone interface (the zealot solution) I would be better off by crafting a phone interface of it’s own. One tailored for maximum impact on that format and device.
See? Far from abandoning the concept of a designed, crafted experience that provides maximum impact and benefit I will make use of that to enhance the other platforms.