Taking Your Talent to the Web

27

think of it. (ECMAScript is so named because the European Computer Manufacturers Association [ECMA] supervised the standardization process.) While Netscape and Microsoft invented competitive new technologies, the W3C worked to develop recommendations that looked beyond the

“Browser Wars.” At times, the W3C seemed to be out of touch with what was actually taking place in the market. Back then, the browser companies seemed to be ignoring the W3C. (The irony is that both AOL/Netscape and Microsoft participate in the W3C and play a vital role in developing the web standards they have sometimes gone on to ignore.) Today it appears that the W3C is ahead of what browser companies can realistically deliver in the next year or two. Indeed, even hardened web designers with years of experience can feel their innards turn to jelly when reading about upcoming standards proposed by the W3C. (XML Namespaces, anybody?)

The important thing is that there is now a road map for browser companies, developers, and designers. If you took your talent to the Web in the 1990s, you had no way of knowing what new technologies might come down the pike, what new skills you would have to learn, and how quickly what you learned (and designed) would become obsolete. Today we know which standards have been fully or partially implemented in browsers and which ones we can expect to work with in the next year or two. As opposed to the past when Netscape could surprise us by inventing JavaScript and frames or Microsoft could spring VBScript and ActiveX on us and expect us to quickly learn and use those technologies, today we know what to anticipate and what to learn to prepare for the future.

OPEN STANDARDS—THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR

GEEKS ANYMORE

We’ll bore you with the details in Part III of this book. For now, it is enough that you understand three fundamentals of web agnosticism.

Point #1: The Web Is Platform-Agnostic

The Web owes no special fealty to any particular operating system. It is designed to work in Windows, Mac OS, Linux, UNIX, BeOS, FreeBSD, OS2, DOS, and any other platform that comes along. This presents web

28 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Open Standards

designers with special challenges in terms of gamma, screen resolution, color palettes, and typography—all of which we’ll explore a bit later in this chapter. This is one heck of a chapter—we hope you realize that. If you get tired and want to take breaks, we’ll understand.

At first blush, the programmers on your team would seem to have a tougher job than you do. How on earth are they supposed to accommodate all those different operating systems? The answer is, they don’t have to. Browser companies are stuck with the tough job of supporting all those platforms (or a limited subset thereof). Web standards do the rest. JavaScript is JavaScript whether it’s running in Linux or Mac OS. Style sheets are style sheets whether they’re running on Windows 2000 or BeOS. The more web standards the browsers support and the more completely they support those standards, the fewer migraines programmers (and web users) will have to endure.

You, on the other hand, will continually test your designs for crossplatform feasibility. You will have to cope with the fact that your favorite Mac system font is not available on the PC (or vice versa). That those tawny PC colors look pale as Christina Ricci on the Mac. That the large, bold sans serif headline that looks so dapper on systems with scalable type and builtin anti-aliasing (such as Mac OS and Windows 98) may look hillbillyhomely on platforms lacking those niceties (such as Linux).

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) programs, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive, attempt to give designers the sensation of retaining complete visual control over web layouts. It is an illusion. A vast majority of professional web designers still hand-code their pages. At the very least, they hand-tweak Dreamweaveror GoLive-generated code to accommodate the reality of browser and platform differences.

Browser and platform differences mean that the precise control you’ve come to expect from publishing programs such as Quark XPress and Adobe InDesign simply does not exist on the Web. You can bemoan this fact or learn to create beautiful work that exploits the medium’s changeable nature and facilitates the needs of millions—perhaps even entertaining them in the process. Not such a bad trade-off, when you come right down to it.

Taking Your Talent to the Web

29

Point #2: The Web Is Device-Independent

Your work not only has to remain usable on a terrifying variety of computer

desktops, it also may be accessed via Palm Pilots, web phones, and other

instruments of Satan. A year ago it appeared that web designers and pro-

grammers would have to continually learn new and incompatible markup

languages to accommodate this plethora of web-enabled devices. Instead,

the W3C is guiding us toward using Extensible Hypertext Markup Language

(XHTML) and CSS to get the job done. (Don’t panic! XHTML is, more or less,

simply a newer and cleaner version of HTML.)

From www.w3.org/Mobile/Activity:

"Mobile devices are unlikely to be able to use exactly the same markup as a normal page for a PC. Instead they will use a subset of HTML tags. The expectation is that different devices will make use of different modules of XHTML; similarly they will support different modules of style sheets. For example, one mobile device might use the basic XHTML text module and the style sheet voice module. Another device with a large screen might also allow the XHTML tables module."

The W3C website is visually lackluster, unmanageably immense, and writ-

ten in language only a Stanford professor could love. Nevertheless, the

W3C is frequently the voice of sanity in the chaos and frenzy of an ever-

changing, commerce-driven Web. Learn to overlook the site’s lack of visual

panache, and the W3C will be your best friend as the Web and your career

move forward. Which brings us to Point #3.

Point #3: The Web Is Held Together by

Standards

To design websites, you will have to learn technologies such as HTML,

JavaScript, and CSS, which really isn’t that hard. As you grow more adept,

you will become aware of wonderful features offered in only one browser

or another. We advise you to avoid these nonstandard technologies and

stick, as much as possible, to what is supported in all browsers.

You might find yourself working for companies or clients who demand spe-

cial features that only work in one browser. Just say no. On an intranet site

(see Chapter 5), it might be feasible to design a site that only works in IE5,

30 WHY: Designing for the Medium: Open Standards

Netscape 4, or what have you, because those who commission the site control the browsers used to access it. But we’ve heard of plenty of companies that decided to go public with part of their intranet site—only to discover that its nonstandard features locked out millions of web users. We also know an agency that designed an intranet site to take advantage of Netscape 4’s proprietary DHTML Layers technology. When Netscape abandoned this technology in favor of web standards, the company’s IT department was unable to upgrade its users to the latest version of Netscape’s browser, which would have made the site nonfunctional. Who took the blame for this fiasco: the client who had insisted on using proprietary, nonstandard technology or the web agency that had argued against it? If you’ve had any real experience as a designer, you’ll understand that the question is rhetorical.

You can often get away with taking the moral high ground simply by explaining to your clients that delivering what they request will cost them 25% or more of their potential audience. The disabled are almost always among the first to be locked out of a site that relies on proprietary technology. Excluding millions of people from a public site is not exactly a brilliant business decision, and ethically speaking, it stinks. Excluding the disabled is also illegal in many instances, at least in the United States. Court cases have been fought over it, and the client usually loses. The Australian Olympics website was one legal casualty; the cost to the site’s owners would have wiped out poverty in three small South American nations. If legal and ethical arguments don’t work with your clients, show them the money.

Technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS are the building blocks of web design. In theory, all browsers fully support these standards, delivering on the promise of browser and platform-agnosticism and offering us a Web where we can “write once, publish everywhere.” Theory and reality often diverge. In fact, the divergence between them is more or less the story of the Web. The good news is that built-in browser incompatibilities are gradually going the way of the Dodo bird as more standards-compliant browsers become available.