molly.com
Thursday 20 April 2006
Internal and External Web Standards Evangelism
“Corporations . . . will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.” – Cluetrain Manifesto
Internal web standards evangelists have it the hardest. You know who you are. You work in business, education, government or some other organization. You climb the corporate ladders, battle the academic arrogance, stave off the government paperwork and endure the organizational politics. You hang in there for years and you do not give up.
External web standards evangelists preach in the community commons and hope to catch an ear. External web standards evangelists work on the outside to spread the word about Web standards, accessibility, best practices and professionalism. We hang in there for years, and do not give up.
Both the internal and external evangelist play a critical role in the success of the adoption of standards and best practices in the Web design and development field. Helping each other works even better.
Internal or external?
Filed under: professional, society, standards, web design and development
Posted by: Molly | 16:27 | Comments (60)
I’d like to see myself as an external right now but perhaps I’ll become an internal soon.
What about yourself? Internal or external?
In my organisation, the internal evangelist’s battle includes educating and upskilling web writers, editors and maintainers. Most of these staff work in isolation from each other and have ‘web’ only as an added extra in their job descriptions, if it’s there at all.
As well, we have a collegial model of devolved management, which in the web realm translates into ‘decision by consensus’. In the last three years the central web team has taken a seductive approach — make our standards-based templates, tools and training programs so attractive that everyone will *want* to join in. So far, it’s working reasonably well.
Our next trick will be to introduce the Cluetrain concept of web as a conversation that everyone can join…
I’m internal, it really is hard, and I know who I am. It does please me to say that after nearly three years of quietly preaching in the cubicles (plus a few loud arguments) the higher-ups are finally getting on board, even to the point that I’ve been asked to train the rest of the team on web standards and accessibility.
Vive la revolución reservada.
I’m internal and it’s been like shouting at the mountain, trying to get it to move. That said, the planets seem to be coming into alignment this summer. People are starting to “get” standards and the feeling is incredible.
It’s a lot of fun to be internal. Instead of being a street corner preacher, yelling myself hoarse and trying to get the attention of anyone who may wander by, I’m a standards-based sniper, picking off high value targets with my merry band of guerilla standardistas. Like I said… it’s fun, and ultimately rewarding, because we can all look back at the progress (from “standards, wha?!” to hearing the CTO of the company speak at an all-hands about web standards and microformats) and have concrete examples. We don’t get the speaking gigs or the book deals, but we have a hell of a lot of fun.
How fun is it to be internal? It’s this fun (sorry for the double post, but I figured an actual example would be good).
External is fairly easily, the worse they can do is ignore you. And when things go wrong they have to find a solution.
Internal is harder, they ignore you and sit in the next cubicle coding like it is 1999 because it works in the corporate browser. And when things go wrong, you are the onee to fix it, because they have not learnt anything new in the last 7 years.
And then there is C) All of the Above and D) None of the Above. Many people inside the evil empire I work for are both, and the vast majority are neither.
I like to think that I’m both. I make a point of showing the internals things I’ve done externally and the externals the things I’ve done internally.
My policy is that this sort of thing transcends boundaries. *Everyone* needs to know and benefit from the information regardless of if they work with you or not. So, presentations I make at work about unobtrusive scripting (or whatever comes in the future) are/will be made available to the web at large, and tutorials I write for slayeroffice are spammed to our internal listservs.
Like Steve, I like to think I’m both. Internally, for me at least, it’s easier to walk the standards line. I work in the gov’t sector and get paid to preach the gospel (I’m an instructor of web technologies).
While I also preach standards outside, my work isn’t always where my mouth is. Come on now, how many of you have strayed from the standards conscious path to make a deadline and get paid?
Be honest now
I’m definitely primarily an internal evangelist. I worked at Microsoft Certified partner comprised mostly of application engineers with no web experience. Not exactly a huge amount of enthusiasm about web standards around here. Which is generally important for a Web CMS vendor.
Since I started last June, I’ve been in a constant battle to make standards support a priority. I’m actually proud to say that we’ve actually had a few sites win awards from CSS Beauty and one nominated at SXSWi for CSS design. All I can say is that if you keep throwing logic at people, they can only ignore it for so long.
Very much internal. It was only after a conversation with Derek and Molly at WE05 that I started to be more external. Thanks guys! It has been fun so far.
I’m definately external although recently I did a few months of Quality Assurance on a government site (i’m not sure they want me back though lol) so internal advocate could also be put on me.
The hardest part about the internal advocacy is when you do suggest things and are stonewalled by your on the ground tech people – to the point they dont’ even use skip links or state to your face that they don’t have FOUC… in other words shut up… lol.
So I do admire anyone who spends years fighting the good fight in an environment where you have to pitch to managers who know nothing about the web but who perceive their position gives them the final say. While the pay was regular – i did like that – there were underlying pressures to not comment on the code.
doing QA and being not allowed to download firefox for cross browser testing or even to validate pages as a development tool – heck i didn’t even get connected to the printer in 2 months !!!!
So hats off to those guys and girls for sure. The way harder task…
An internal evangelist – the Best Practice contact for “front-end development”. The longest struggle has been over management mind-share, its been a battle, fielding a number of ill-thoughtout excuses to plain simple ignorance of web accessibility. Now its a game of resources – trying to get people skilled in tackling web accessibility properly. The technical part of it has been relatively straight-forward, its the battle of the minds and politics that have been the major barriers.
Only 15 comments in to this thread – and your readership have got it spot on…(my thoughts are very similar on this). I think nortypig has ‘nailed it’ with his response…and I agree with Isofarro too. The guys/gals doing the internal evangelising have really got the tougher role…and both internal and external are very important. I’m more of the latter at the moment purely by circumstances rather than choice.
I’m internal. The corporation employs about 100,000 people and there are intranet and internet projects of all sizes on the go. My team is involved with a small number of these projects because we have limited resources so a lot of work goes to external design agencies and off-shore developers (some of it managed by us but the majority managed by others).
I’m having some success educating people internally but my biggest problem is with the off-shore developers. I’ve worked with different off-shore teams on several projects and have found their knowledge of standards, accessibility etc. to be extremely limited (they were adamant that Netscape didn’t support alt attributes because they couldn’t see the tooltip behaviour incorrectly implemented by IE).
They are very definitely stuck in 1999 which is extremely frustrating. This wouldn’t be so bad if they truly didn’t realise that best practices have changed and were now making an effort to further their knowledge. But even after lengthy conference calls, emails, examples and anything else I can think of I’ve made little progress. Having said that though I’m not giving up.
Im definetly internal and its become quite hard lately, I feel that I have sucessfully explained web standards to most members of our tech team, even the management, but when it comes to the senior programmers they don’t seem to show interest, they are .net developers using Visual Studio.
I very often find myself cleaning up the mess they have made. But if they started to understand and apprciate standards, instead of building proprietary javascript functions that only work in Internet Explorer (for a small example, there are more but I wont rant forever) they would realise things in the long run are alot easier.
They just brush aside what I am saying and bombard me with excuses saying “you have to think about costs and the mass market, 80% of people use Internet Explorer”.. And that kinda of attitute really irritates me! What about the other 20% then? .. But everything I ever try to explain, such as why web standards and best practices are important, they will brush aside.
Im not sure why that is, whether they feel superior being the “senior programmer” and me being the youngest guy on the team (22) who has come in with all these new ways of working and maybe they just can’t adapt? But to me they are stuck in 1999 and it really really really annoys me.
The struggle will continue, sometimes I feel like giving up and just rectifying their mess all the time.
Yours Truely, a frustrated web standards developer. Please set me free!
A very depressed internal type. Largely ignored until visitors complain.
I’m internal.
Why? Coz I work in a university and had to put up with politics and a zillion web representives, most of which do not know about nor care about web standards.
Fortunately, my web team are quite well conversed in web standards and we try to show people why it is a good thing.
I even bought DOM Scripting and other web standard-related books to shut them up!
Both I guess.
Internal to try to educate the web masters at work (I am not one at work but do web work from home).
External via my blog and the teaching books I have written.
Internal, trying to go external.
Internal, it’s cool to have others like Kevin Lawver, David Artz to help back me up. We’ve got a great group working on it. Developers, the optimzation team, and designers. I’ve even talked designers and whomever will listen, into studying and learning about it because they can’t shut me up!
Mostly internal, some external. I’m part of a small web development team in a subsidiary of a very large healthcare company. In our own backyard, I can preach standards and get little flak about it, I’ve ‘converted’ my boss and she’s with me on it. So is my programmer colleague who does all the .Net stuff – but I struggle with his penchant for using tables to display his ASP generated content
.
In the larger corporate environment, our corporate web people churn out the ugliest, nastiest, nearly completely inaccessible garbage – it makes me want to raid their office at HQ, I don’t think a single one of them even has a clue what the standards are and certainly know NOTHING about accessibilty. They build sites for hospitals, but I pity the disabled person, and especially those who have to use screen readers, who try to find any information on one of those hospitals site. Looking at those sites in code view makes me ill and there’s nothing I can do about it.
On the external side, I do some freelance work and I build sites using standards. Most clients don’t understand it, they just want their site to function and be pretty. I do however “preach” standards if web development comes up in a conversation with other web folks
Some will grab on, others will only go kicking and screaming !
Very firmly both, although I’d prefer it if the internal stuff wasn’t necessary.
Molly I think you know the answer to this one already, I’ve moaned about it enough to you I think
Definately Internal!
…and progress is all soooooooo sloooooooooow. Made my first mark by creating an entirely CSS laid out, valid XHTML version of the home page and it felt so gooooooood! Just a few hundred sites left to go before our Intranet enters the 21st century!
Internal but I don’t even talk to higher-ups about code or the concept of standards. Instead I show them a page on my mobile and hand them a clean print-out of the same page and say “It’s automatically like throughout the entire site.”
Done and done.
Josef Dunne mentions: “but when it comes to the senior programmers they don’t seem to show interest, they are .net developers using Visual Studio.”
That is a big problem for me too. The underlying problem is that senior developers don’t do HTML – that’s something juniors do. That’s why the typical large company website looks like a dog’s breakfast. I’m resorting to calling it an Anti-Pattern – a techie term that kinda hits home.
Senior developers don’t do HTML. That’s the attitude that needs to be tackled, since if they don’t do HTML, how can they be expected to do e-commerce development? I say they shouldn’t be allowed near an e-commerce application without the requisite skills.
I’m definately internal. I’m responsible for my department’s web presence at a small college (which is about 50% of my job). However, trying to get the college’s IT department to play along has been like pulling teeth “no, the college will not purchase any web development software other than FrontPage.”
At least I’ve got complete control over my department’s web presence.
Internal at State government agency.
I’ve whined about my particular situation in this and other blogs before so I won’t carry on too much here. Molly was my gateway to the large community of Web Standards Evangelists out there that opened my eyes and brain to the logic and practicality of coding using Web Standards.
Unfortunately, the agency I work in and my supervisor are operating on a “Don’t Know, Don’t Care” policy apparently and I was recently threatend with disiplinary action for using definition lists instead of tables for “presentational consistancy”. I tried to explain the concept of Web Standards, Semantic coding and CSS, but it was futile. To make things worse, the experts in our IT Dept. seem to be stuck on the 90’s concept of Web coding techniques and technology as well.
I’ll keep up trying to enlighten folks around here, and I’m trying to get my boss to attend Webvisions 06 up here in Portland to help her see the light somehow. In the meantime, I make it a point to put as much good coding in as I can without getting caught!
For those masochists or morbidly curious out there, here’s the site currently have to work with.
I know that I am a particularly isolated situation and other agencys and departments in the state are better organized and knowlegable, it’s just that MY particular situation is singularly myopic.
Keepin’ the faith tho’
D’oh! Here’s the link.
Here: insurance.oregon.gov.
Sorry.
I’m primarily internal, but try to spread the word to neighbours and associates in my field of vision. As others have said, internal and external evangelists are complementary, and both are essential. I can win small battles internally by myself, but when it comes to the bigger picture nothing much would happen without the visible ‘movement’ that comes from the external evangelists all pointing in pretty much the same direction.
While my task-masters don’t fundamentally understand what web standards and web accessibility are about, they do understand the good publicity, praise and kudos that the organisation has accrued from me putting them into practice. And that publicity only comes because there’s a vocal group out there pushing the message.
@Isofarro: “The underlying problem is that senior developers don’t do HTML – that’s something juniors do.” That’s a tough one to crack. Is the problem that HTML is seen as below them, despite being effectively the UI for their applications? It doesn’t matter how good their back-end code is, if the UI sucks their efforts are wasted.
Internal. One down, one to go!
It’s exhausting work and takes a real commitment to see it through. The bigger the organization, the bigger the commitment. Because once you start, you don’t stop until the job is done. Giving up is not an option.
As difficult as it may be, there is nothing more rewarding than taking a monolithic legacy code-base and turning it on its head. Even more satisfying is the opportunity to educate fellow Web developers; to watch them shed the old ways and adopt the best practices is a beautiful thing.
Thank you for not using the dreaded ’standardista’ eponym in your well thought out, and very good post.
Primarily internal.
It has been and is a very hard slog. In a perverse way, it’s making me feel better reading through the comments, and seeing that we’re all going through the same pain (and understanding what’s causing that pain). I’m not alone in this world!
Dan Champion comments: “Is the problem that HTML is seen as below them, despite being effectively the UI for their applications?”
Yep.
Dan continues: “It doesn’t matter how good their back-end code is, if the UI sucks their efforts are wasted.”
Agreed. Yet the design of the application (from an architecture/java design pattern) is more interesting and important to an expert and senior developer. I’m beginning to think that calling what we do “web development” is a lost cause – they don’t actually know what the web is. I’m starting to call what we do (web standards, accessibility, proper server-side validation) as ecommerce development. Too many people here think web development is “just front end stuff” – we do that and the whole raft of Java gimmicks, and everything else that makes up a web experience (XML and web services, P3P, HTTP).
I’m another internal guy, and yes it is easy and it is hard at the same time – in our case, because the people you need to sell the idea’s too (the business folk with the $$$) are not the ones who are working with the technologies.
Added to that is the fact that we seem to be becoming an organization of project managers, with more reliance on offshore vendors to do the actual tech work. As someone has already pointed out, the knowledge and awareness of these vendors around web standards, application design and accesibility seems to be very limited. An extreme, and quite depressing example was one page I came accross a few months ago, where the developer had used non breaking spaces to center align a button. We have also had our fair share of ‘Firefox bugs’ due to lack of testing, and that again is a gap we are trying to close.
On the bright side, we do seem to be keen to start developing Web 2.0 style applications, I’m just concerned that we don’t have the right skill mix to produce something non embarassing!
Definitely internal.
Both are required and I know I couldn’t keep going without the input of others, whether internals or externals themselves.
I do wonder sometimes which is harder to take from other people – hostility or apathy. At least with hostility you’ve got their attention
Internal.
And as Ruth has stated above, it heartening to read these other stories and know you aren’t going it alone. It gets lonely sometimes.
Still, after 3 years it *is* starting to come together for the place I work. Standards are given fairly high priority, but there is always someone using non-breaking spaces to centre a button (I feel for ya Chris!).
I’m internal. With a few exceptions it’s been very much “you’re the expert, we’ll trust you and do it your way”. Winner!
Both.
Internally it’s my full-time job (stop drooling, people) as accessibility expert. Of course I try to explain that conformity is the first step, and sometimes it works. And yes I love that
And externally I’ve been active in several communities (French-speaking mailing-lists and stuff).
I figure it’s a kind of crusade. Once you start you can’t stop, you have to be evangelising every day, because you can’t stop being passionate anyway.
I’m external and Internal at the same time. I in-house a lot work for some companies, yet the bigger they are the harder it is to get them to accept web standards.
We even just lost a client that needed web standards, because they feel that what was working before can still work now even though they hired us to help them upgrade their web site. They are in the process of getting fined for not following web standards.
[...] Check out the conversation going on at molly.com [...]
Internal … so deeply immersed in internal projects lately that I catch up with Molly almost a month late. I’ve also put my own blog, access-matters.com, on hiatus.
OTOH, I find my situation not nearly as bleak as some of the other internals here. In fact, I’m delighted with where we are right now. A few years ago, I made the right pitch to the right Director, at exactly the right time, and we transformed our intranet from 1990s tag soup to web standards based.
The “exactly right time” was at the cusp of a new design update, an important transition moment. The conversion work a few of us did to get to web standards has had the ripple effect of introducing literally hundreds and hundreds of other developers and designers to web standards, and they universally report great satisfaction in moving forward.
At the same time, I built-in a lot of accessibility features. We got them into templates and deep into CMS systems. A firm as large as ours has a goodly number of people with disabilities, and a very strong corporate policy for making sure all of our internal applications are accessible. That policy spills over (explicitly) into improving the accessibility features of our products too.
At the moment, our intranet portal implements accessibility features as yet unmatched in the industry. (That’s a blog article someday.)
The result: an intranet that’s used by over 325,000 people daily, with several million pages of content, with dozens of applications (not just static data), and millions of page views daily. One proof point is that it got us to #5 in this year’s Nielsen Norman Group’s “10 Best Intranets.”
Yes, internal is hard, and hard for a lot of the reasons others have already mentioned. Yet, when you make a breakthrough, it is extraordinarily satisfying.
Next up, our external site … and getting back to sharing externally.
Yep, both external (jedisthlm.com) and internal (skatteverket.se).
Internal, for 8 years now, and I do it because its the right thing to do. Its hard, but it’s rewarding.
It’s slow, it’s complicated, it’s involved, its hard to get ideas across to people who aren’t on the same planet (or maybe they’re just in marketing).
Even when you know the right thing to do and have the standards its getting the budget to do the project that applies them that’s the real bind.
I think companies who research what is the right thing to do, should always publish their findings and standards – BBC Web Standards. Help others learn, and if its wrong, maybe some helpful soul will drop you a line and tell you.
The best thing, when you’ve helped someone.
External, its scarey. Tried it once, it went well. Lesson not learnt – “Have courange in your own convictions”
[...] Most of us work with branding; marketing; content management systems – accessibility has to make compromises. As Molly wrote Internal web standards evangelists have it the hardest … You work in business, education, government or some other organization. You climb the corporate ladders, battle the academic arrogance, stave off the government paperwork and endure the organizational politics. [...]
[…] Check out the conversation going on at molly.com […]
Workout music to get pumped up
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thanks
You are very preety molly. How long you have this blog ?