molly.com
Saturday 31 December 2005
Your Three Web Standards Wishes for 2006
WEB STANDARDS WISHES can come true. At least in my little fantasy they do!
Put aside all thoughts of possible or impossible and dream up the three most desired improvements, changes, or new perspectives that you would like to see in the Web standards design and development arena.
I have so many it’s difficult to ask for three, but here goes:
- CSS 2.1 formally becomes a recommendation
- WCAG 2.0 gets sorted out
- More companies, organizations, and agencies get into best practices
Then, let’s choose the top three and see if we can’t make them happen for real. Let’s have your best, and a very happy 2006 to all.
Filed under: general
Posted by: Molly | 11:51 | Comments (30)
Some standards for forms, including automatically assigning a label to whatever input it’s wrapped around.
WYSWYG editors support web standards.
Information on what I can put in a comment textarea on this site.
More articles on how to make beautiful and usable forms.
More server-side programmers and developers to get turned on to standards.
Wider awareness that automated validation is just a guide and not a guarantee of a well written site.
I’m totally with you on your 3rd item Molly. A greater emphasis on best practices would be very valuable.
Happy new Year!
1) As a minimum, all third-party software including CMSs produce both validated markup and CSS and meets all points of WCAG 1.0 (WCAG 2.0 preferred).
2) All user agents either follow or not follow W3C standards to the letter, there is no between.
This should save a lot of headache for web developers who may have to come up with needless hacks for partial-conforming user agents. Currently, just about every user agent have partial implementation of W3C standards.
It may seem impossible in the real world, but to a web developer like myself, I prefer to see things in black and white: I know which user agent supports which standards implementation (saves me from having to test, test, test all the time) and many, many hacks may be obsolute as a result.
3) Educate people, not just about web standards, but a grey area called “semantics”. What are definition lists used for? What about blockquote? Can it be used for indenting information or quoting something?
Lots of confused minds need education and perhaps complement it with a semantics dictionary (paperback) which most people will all agree on in terms of semantics. Perhaps we will see less div-itis and class-itis thereby introducing more meaningful web documents.
I second Tanny.
I have just one wish (in this area of my life).
A WYSIWYG editor that supports CSS.
I build standard complaint sites (using TopStyle Pro or Notepad, if you have to know). and then the content owner gets the site, and sometime s/he needs to change the content (that is why he is the content owner). They beg me to give them back tables. They just can’t maintain it (They use FrontPageor or Dreamweaver), no matter what I do. They don’t want to learn (X)HTML and CSS, they want to edit it like Word. This is the most frustrating aspect of writing standard complaint sites for me.
1.More web standards compliant authoring tools for developers.
2.W3 validator automatically fixes the page for you not just points out the problem.
3.Video not just audio of web standards group meetings!
- IE 7 doesn’t just fix the selector bugs used for hacks, but the css problems that make developers use hacks in the first place
- once WCAG 2.0 is released, developers actually try to understand accessibility, rather than relying on automated validators
- an update to UAAG (User Agent Accessibility Guidelines) and browsers actually sorting out some of the things that, currently, are dumped on developers…style switchers, text size buttons, even text only versions should all be implemented client side by the browser and made obvious to the average user – for that matter, browsers should make their customisation options even more up-front on first run/install…i never want to hear the usual “but users don’t even know they CAN resize text” excuse
bonus one:
- a simple, accessible (both with regards to WCAG on the front-end and ATAG on the back-end) CMS for the masses.
and, on a personal note:
- that i get an inspiring job where i’m actually encouraged (and dare i say rewarded, or at least appreciated) for trying to consistently use web standards and accessibility recommendations.
I agree with Ashley’s second point – that would indeed be great and make it much easier for beginners to understand what was wrong and how it could be made better (i.e. correct).
Second, I hope that IE will really be a by far better browser than all versions before were – that it can (at least regarding web standards support, I’m not talking about security issues) compete with Mozilla/Firefox and Opera. (Ok, that’s a pretty impossible one …
)
The third one is just my personal one: I hope that as soon as possible, XHTML 2.0 is “released” and also supported by web sites. New elements like a navigation list could make development so much more interesting.
That IE7 lives up to the promises.
That Jo/e Public (who knows little of, and cares even less about, standards and doesn’t know that anything exists beyond MS) actually upgrades to IE7.
That CSS positioning weren’t such a pain in the proverbial.
I think your third wish is definitely going to come true.
Otherwise, I’d like full standards compliance in Dreamweaver and Contribute, please.
And a miracle that causes every Win IE 5 and 5.5 user to upgrade to IE 6(or Firefox, that would be better, even)
My biggest wish would be that WYSIWYG editors are web standards compliant. Especially software aimed at the home user market, such as MS Frontpage and AOL CoffeeCup etc.
Happy New year to all the readers of molly
Some good ones here.
I second (or is that 131st), the WCAG 2 points and in addition would like to see:
Greater moves to common content structures
Case law in the UK for web accessibilty
A greater appreciation of standards and their adoption by those purchasing web sites
I’d add Netscape 4 to Dutchkid’s miracle (yes, I do know of people who are still using it).
If Richard got his 2nd wish (UK law) then Patrick might get his personal wish (appreciation of his accessibility work).
1) Expansion of HTML and XHTML to include more semantically correct tag names, the better to describe content with (probably one for XHTML 1.1).
2) Begin a “best practices” movement/organization/body that formalizes Web Standards development techniques.
3) Begin a “to hell with bad websites” campaign, to finally stamp out crummy sites with sloppy and deprecated markup.
[1] CMS improvements.
[2] Web and authoring applications: support, use, and output standards.
Includes: ecommerce solutions [carts, catalogs, forms], library database search tools, online learning courseware systems, search applications, browsers, …
[3] Better Education for developers, designers, and educators — also, for anyone who will be using the web for business or work [includes intranet, extranet, and internet]. Which means just about everyone needs to know how important standards or best practises is for everyone.
Maybe more offline media attention might be helpful in getting some of these things done?
Hmm.
1) A standards compliant WYSIWYG editor which can be embedded in CMS solutions.
).
2) IE7 turns out to actually support standards. As in, standards that people other than Microsoft support.
3) Opera gains majority marketshare (hey you didn’t say they had to be realistic wishes
1. An application such as RapidWeaver to be bought out by Apple who get it _down_ so that non-coding designers and ‘amateur’ website builders start setting up standard compliant sites without the need for mind-bending code to be digested and used.
2. Internet explorer to be deemed illegal and banished forever
3. Website builders to forge ahead with CSS regardless of browsers holding it back (ie put the horse before the cart and make web surfing denizens choose the appropriate carts accordingly).
(from others lists I love the idea of validators autofixing cranky CSS).
in response to : “A WYSIWYG editor that supports CSS”
Word. I’ve just found myself with a job, where I get to clean up the mess someone else made when they tried to use a WYSIWYG to create their webpage.
in respone to : “CMS improvements”
ditto that too. Trying to find a xhtml and section 508 complaint CMS is kind of like a wild goose chase. I ended up using Textpattern and making major modifications to make it more CMS like and not so Blog like.
My wish: A world where all browsers adhere to web standards to a T and webpages display consistently across browsers. oh that would be so nice.
1. More CMS produce semantic and standards compliant markup
2. built-in CMS WYSIWYG editors produce semantic and standards compliant markup
3. IE not included in default windows installation package (only as an option)
1. Additive quantities in CSS… (e.g. top: (72px+1px+1.25em+1px);) – So that I can create a fluid layout with a fixed logo, floating right sidebar and still based all on em height.
2. Change the box model (I know I’ll hear about it for this one) – width and height should be from just inside the border. That way ‘width: 25%; padding: 10px;’ will be 25% wide instead of 25%+20px.
3. Single User – Developer or Lite editions (web browser functionality only) of JAWS or other screen reader software for web developers to assist in creating better sites for low vision/blind users. (I had the opportunity to play with JAWS this past weekend and found serious design flaws in my sites that previously passed accessability tests.)
[...] Molly Holzschlag má přání především po stránce finalizace standardů a jejich široké adopci v praxi. Komentáře obsahují mnoho dalšího, co by přispělo ke zkvalitnění a zefektivnění webové tvorby, ať už má jít o lepší funkčnost WYSIWYG widgetů, IE7, lepší aplikační podporu v oblasti webu, novou funkčnost v CSS atd.… [...]
Sorry for this late entry, but I just recently noticed that MIT/CSAIL uses table-based layout (http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php). Therefore, I suppose it would be a good wish to see the workplace of Tim Berners-Lee make the transition.
Three wishes:
1. That support for non-screen @media types will flourish among PDAs, phones and assistive technology.
2. That there will be a mass migration away from IE 6 and below.
3. That XHTML2 and CSS3 would become recommendations.
1. All frameset-related tags get deprecated, and browser support for them dropped retroactively. Developers roll up their sleeves, go back and take it out of netscape 4, etc..
2. A different kind of relative positioning in CSS where you can specify that #b starts 1em (or whatever) below (or relative to any side of) #a, #c, and #x no matter what size the others end up with when they are filled with content. This would end the nightmare of getting floats to cooperate and reduce development time and code size by a LOT, and you could put your content in whatever order you want in your source code much more easily.
3. Cross-platform standardization of font sizes. Apple, M$, KDE, Gnome and the rest agree on a way to render fonts and change their systems to work with that standard in the next update, which is relased next Thursday.
4. The entire concept of WYSIWYG editing for the web (at least on the level of complete pages… I’m looking at you, Macrodobe GoDream and your ilk…) is exposed for the delusion it really is. Every school teaches semantic XHTML and the concept of structured documents before kids ever see a non-semantic word processor. Everyone is taught to appreciate the importance of conveying meaning first and style second. Word gets out that you have to actually learn HTML if you want to make web pages competently.
5. Apple fixes atrocious HTML export from Pages.
6. OpenOffice fixes atrocious HTML export.
7. M$ fixes Word’s atrocious HTML export.
8. FrontPage finally dies for good. All the mangled code it ever generated simply disappears and nobody misses it, as if it were never there.
9. New version of Apache enforces well-formed code, refuses to serve anything less.
10. XHTML spec gets a clean, standardized way to deal with footnotes.
11. XHTML spec gets a clean, standardized way to deal with image captions and credits so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel for every freakin’ image.
12. The Bush regime is forced to step down and go home (taking their fascist theocratic program with them), the war stops, the torture stops and we don’t end up in a high-tech dark ages. Oh wait… WEB standards.
oh sorry… i was just writing away and forgot it’s supposed to be only 3 wishes. d’oh.
nerkles, what if #a, #c and #x in turn depend on #b for their position? Then you have a circular dependency that could be troublesome, causing infinite loops in rendering calculations. The designers of CSS have been pretty careful to avoid such pitfalls.
I wish there was some forum (and maybe there is) of standards-based web designers looking for clients in geographic form…I know of a few arts organizations (get on this web designers-the revolution is coming!) that are searching for web designers in the Philly area. Where should I direct them??? I’m too busy, and still too new at this, to take them on myself. Email me if you’re interested!
Greg:
I thought of that and chose to leave it out for brevity. But yeah, that would be tricky to manage. The parser would have to recognize a circular reference and have a way to deal with it (namely, stop going in circles… be able to say “have I been here before?”). It’s not impossible to handle, though it would be challenging to code a parser/renderer for that. In any case, a CSS validator could warn you, and you’d know something was wrong when your layout doesn’t work as expected.
thanks for your sharing