I wanted to write these articles for a long time now. But with the new job and everything, I don’t even have time to get my new design online. So I figured I’d start with the articles anyway and do the redesign when I have the time. The WordPress template is a good example of using these standards so it will serve as an example and will do the job to present my story.
Before I start with a technical discussion about web standards, let’s see what you and I want from a website and how these standards can help us.
If I wanted to make a website, what do I want from it in general terms?
- (part 1) I want everybody to be able to see what I have to say or sell.
- (part 2) I want a great looking presence with lots of features and functions
- (part 3) I want it to be lean and mean when it comes to downloading and rendering on the screen.
- (part 4) I want search engines to rate my website as high as possible.
- (part 5) I don’t want to spend too much of my time maintaining my website, fixing bugs, changing the layout or adding content.
We all want that, right? And can we do it without working our fingertips to the bone and preferably without some form of carpal syndrome? Maybe not, but let’s try.
I want everybody to be able to see what I have to say or sell.
To make a website accessible to everybody, we have to define the word EVERYBODY. This is actually very simple if you think about it, it just means all people with a computer and an internet connection.
Now that we know who’s everybody, forget about browsers and OS’s. Think about these people. The audience from a website is not just the elite with the latest machine that can break human DNA code. No, my audience is the girl/guy next door who doesn’t care about my problems as a web designer. These are REAL people. And unfortunately, real people have flaws. It ‘s even worse if you think about their pc’s. They don’t care about what this machine in front of them is doing or how it works (is this a flaw?). Someone else might have very specific needs and they adapted this pc to meet these needs. The bottom line is, that they all have a different setup and probably don’t know or care about the latest release of some type of Mozilla browser.
If we aim to please all these visitors, things can get quickly out of hand. Because, how are we going to make sure our website works on all these specific combinations of OS’s and browsers? We certainly are not going to setup that many test environments. These are requirements that we never will be able to define or grasp, let alone meet. It is just TOO MUCH to consider.
So what to do next?
The only possible solution is to forget about all these possibilities and requirements. Just stick to what all browser vendors agreed upon: HTML and XML.
Both standards, defined by the W3C, were created by a bunch of people from a lot of companies, like Sun , Microsoft, IBM, �Some of them, no to mention Microsoft by name, didn�t quite follow the rules. But most of them did.
If you read the specifications, and use HTML and XML to create your pages you should be able to forget about most of these tech problems. It may sound unbelievable, but I�m doing it right now with a large corporate website.
Accessibility is not only about technological boundaries, it is also about human limitations. But that�s for the next part, this post is getting way to long.