Alright, we’ve got our W3C stripes, now what?
First let’s go over what we shouldn’t do:
Can we get back to web standards please?
Yes. We discussed earlier how anybody can have a standard. So besides using the W3C as a baseline, whose standards do we follow? The first thing we do is look to the masses. What are the really, smart people doing? What sort of publishing trends are going on right now? Are people using floats or absolute positioning? What browsers are people finally shuttering off into irrelevance? We must look to the masses because it is the masses who we work with and it is the masses who we work to reach. The people linked to in this paragraph are not jedi masters because they validate their code. They are jedi masters because they have thrived within the incredible constraints of the browser world to produce beautiful pieces of code, design, and communication goodness. Todd uses a lot of Flash. Doug’s pages can get heavy. Shaun uses a lot of javascript. Jeffrey sometimes creates and deploys color schemes before they are actually in fashion. Dave gets daring and controversial on redesigns. And Dan has committed the ultimate in validation blasphemy by working with us at ESPN.
These people are important because they are uniters. They bring the designer and the coder together. They bring the business team and the production team together. They bring the rules and the exceptions together. It is their ability to mitigate in a world of competing interests which sets them apart. And they are nice guys to boot. We look to people like this to help us learn the best practices the W3C cannot teach us. We learn things like how to best integrate Flash into a publishing environment, how to use multiple stylesheets to change the color of a site every day of the week, and how to replace vomit-inducing browser text with anti-aliased typographical goodness.
Standards exist for the benefit of the web worker almost more so than the end user, and by following the best practices set forth by the best people in our industry, we ensure we are equipping ourselves with a versatile skillset which we can take into any environment. We may never work at a company which requires us to push a big red button to publish our pages, but we almost certainly will work at one which requires some of the methods set forth by these and other pioneers in the web publishing world. If you think standards are all about helping the disabled, you’re wrong. Accessibility is about helping the disabled, and there are both good and bad accessibility standards in use on the web today. Standards, on the other hand, exist so that we can use the minimal amount of labor and energy to create the greatest impact possible.
True enlightenment comes from within
So we’ve learned our ABC’s and our W3C’s, and we’ve studied The Way of the Master, and now we’re ready to levitate above a peaceful grassy area.
The next and possibly most important standard we follow is our own. Tantek Celik followed his own standard when he brought us the Box Model Hack. Suckerfish created the gold standard for dynamic navigation with their CSS/JS dropdowns. And we at ESPN brought typographically rich scalable headlines to the world using Flash and Javascript. None of these things were being preached by the W3C, nor were they in use on the web up to that point. That makes them our own little standards. Standardlings, if you will… or, “rules we follow which others may eventually follow.”
How a standardling sheds its ling
In order to become a meaningful standard on the web, a method must be judged as a generally positive thing, and then deployed on a widespread basis. A good example of this is how Macromedia used the object and embed tags to display Flash seamlessly within web pages. It didn’t conform to W3C specs, but it worked, and it worked well. The method displayed Flash seamlessly on any browser and failed-over silently when set up correctly with javascript. Additionally, users on PC Internet Explorer were able to download the plug-in virtually transparently. As a result of Macromedia’s smart yet “invalid” implementation, the Flash plug-in now permeates over 85% of the world within 14 months of whenever a new version is released. How happy would you be as a web developer if someone told you that everybody in the world would have a shiny new browser within 14 months? Macromedia created a standard from within, and now everyone is reaping the benefits of it. And we haven’t even touched the subject of Flash itself being a standard. That is an incredible accomplishment as well.
If you still need more evidence that breaking the rules can be okay, take a look at the aforementioned Flash headlines we put to use on ESPN.com in 2001. Our method allowed us to create dynamic, scalable, and anti-aliased headlines using any typeface without adversely affecting any browsers. The code used inline javascript and wasn’t totally ideal from an “under the hood” perspective but we felt the attractiveness and functionality gain was worth the paltry fee.
But what happened next is what’s really important. Shaun Inman, an ESPN user and churner of much butter in the web design world, came up with a way to deploy these Flash headlines in a much better way from a coding standpoint. It’s called IFR and If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out. It’s what Shaun uses on his site, it’s what I use on this site, and it’s what we’ll be using on ESPN.com and other Disney properties in the very near future.
So what we have now in IFR is a very promising young standardling which is about to be adopted by a very big company. It’s the result of our original imperfect implementation, followed up by a near-perfect implementation at the hands of the I in IFR. Do I really care how many people adopt it? No. It benefits us and our users and that’s all I care about. If it benefits you and your users, then great, use it too. And don’t forget to shoot a nice thank you note to Shaun. Maybe one day it will be the defacto standard of how to enhance typography on the web.
So, hope to see some great work...
First let’s go over what we shouldn’t do:
- Don’t join the validation army
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. Someone who can write a banking application entirely in Flash is a better coder than you. Someone who can integrate third-party code into a complicated publishing environment is a better coder than you. Think of validation as using picture perfect grammar; it helps you get your ideas across and is a sign of a good education, but it isn’t nearly as important as the ideas and concepts you think of and subsequently communicate. The most charismatic and possibly smartest person I’ve ever worked for was from the South and used the word “ain’t” quite regularly. It didn’t make him any less smart, and, in fact, it made him more memorable. So all I’m saying is there are plenty of things to judge someone on… validation is one of them, but certainly not the most important. - Don’t move on to other technologies thinking you’ve mastered the web
A true mastery of the web takes years. You know all the rules, but only through trial-and-error will you learn all of the many exceptions. In fact, one could argue that the web has more exceptions than rules when it comes to how things display in browsers. One would probably lose that argument, but nonetheless… - Don’t get all Unabomberlike on us
Running your Olsen Twins Fan Club site out of the broom closet is not going to teach you anything about the collaborative environment of electronic publishing. Spewing validation manifestos on message boards isn’t going to show you how to listen, negotiate, compromise, and execute. You need to get out and work with the designers, writers, and businesspeople who will make your own work much much better.
Can we get back to web standards please?
Yes. We discussed earlier how anybody can have a standard. So besides using the W3C as a baseline, whose standards do we follow? The first thing we do is look to the masses. What are the really, smart people doing? What sort of publishing trends are going on right now? Are people using floats or absolute positioning? What browsers are people finally shuttering off into irrelevance? We must look to the masses because it is the masses who we work with and it is the masses who we work to reach. The people linked to in this paragraph are not jedi masters because they validate their code. They are jedi masters because they have thrived within the incredible constraints of the browser world to produce beautiful pieces of code, design, and communication goodness. Todd uses a lot of Flash. Doug’s pages can get heavy. Shaun uses a lot of javascript. Jeffrey sometimes creates and deploys color schemes before they are actually in fashion. Dave gets daring and controversial on redesigns. And Dan has committed the ultimate in validation blasphemy by working with us at ESPN.
These people are important because they are uniters. They bring the designer and the coder together. They bring the business team and the production team together. They bring the rules and the exceptions together. It is their ability to mitigate in a world of competing interests which sets them apart. And they are nice guys to boot. We look to people like this to help us learn the best practices the W3C cannot teach us. We learn things like how to best integrate Flash into a publishing environment, how to use multiple stylesheets to change the color of a site every day of the week, and how to replace vomit-inducing browser text with anti-aliased typographical goodness.
Standards exist for the benefit of the web worker almost more so than the end user, and by following the best practices set forth by the best people in our industry, we ensure we are equipping ourselves with a versatile skillset which we can take into any environment. We may never work at a company which requires us to push a big red button to publish our pages, but we almost certainly will work at one which requires some of the methods set forth by these and other pioneers in the web publishing world. If you think standards are all about helping the disabled, you’re wrong. Accessibility is about helping the disabled, and there are both good and bad accessibility standards in use on the web today. Standards, on the other hand, exist so that we can use the minimal amount of labor and energy to create the greatest impact possible.
True enlightenment comes from within
So we’ve learned our ABC’s and our W3C’s, and we’ve studied The Way of the Master, and now we’re ready to levitate above a peaceful grassy area.
The next and possibly most important standard we follow is our own. Tantek Celik followed his own standard when he brought us the Box Model Hack. Suckerfish created the gold standard for dynamic navigation with their CSS/JS dropdowns. And we at ESPN brought typographically rich scalable headlines to the world using Flash and Javascript. None of these things were being preached by the W3C, nor were they in use on the web up to that point. That makes them our own little standards. Standardlings, if you will… or, “rules we follow which others may eventually follow.”
How a standardling sheds its ling
In order to become a meaningful standard on the web, a method must be judged as a generally positive thing, and then deployed on a widespread basis. A good example of this is how Macromedia used the object and embed tags to display Flash seamlessly within web pages. It didn’t conform to W3C specs, but it worked, and it worked well. The method displayed Flash seamlessly on any browser and failed-over silently when set up correctly with javascript. Additionally, users on PC Internet Explorer were able to download the plug-in virtually transparently. As a result of Macromedia’s smart yet “invalid” implementation, the Flash plug-in now permeates over 85% of the world within 14 months of whenever a new version is released. How happy would you be as a web developer if someone told you that everybody in the world would have a shiny new browser within 14 months? Macromedia created a standard from within, and now everyone is reaping the benefits of it. And we haven’t even touched the subject of Flash itself being a standard. That is an incredible accomplishment as well.
If you still need more evidence that breaking the rules can be okay, take a look at the aforementioned Flash headlines we put to use on ESPN.com in 2001. Our method allowed us to create dynamic, scalable, and anti-aliased headlines using any typeface without adversely affecting any browsers. The code used inline javascript and wasn’t totally ideal from an “under the hood” perspective but we felt the attractiveness and functionality gain was worth the paltry fee.
But what happened next is what’s really important. Shaun Inman, an ESPN user and churner of much butter in the web design world, came up with a way to deploy these Flash headlines in a much better way from a coding standpoint. It’s called IFR and If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out. It’s what Shaun uses on his site, it’s what I use on this site, and it’s what we’ll be using on ESPN.com and other Disney properties in the very near future.
So what we have now in IFR is a very promising young standardling which is about to be adopted by a very big company. It’s the result of our original imperfect implementation, followed up by a near-perfect implementation at the hands of the I in IFR. Do I really care how many people adopt it? No. It benefits us and our users and that’s all I care about. If it benefits you and your users, then great, use it too. And don’t forget to shoot a nice thank you note to Shaun. Maybe one day it will be the defacto standard of how to enhance typography on the web.
So, hope to see some great work...