A ridiculous argument against web standards
Posted on October 30, 2003
Filed Under Design
This “article” is good for a laugh. He just doesn’t get it, and probably never will. Allow me to rant for a minute.
bq. Are they any benefits to using a full CSS integrated solution?
No. There is no real benefit when you start to replace table tags with DIV tags and attempt to control it all in CSS.
Web Standards (XHTML/CSS) is not, I repeat, not about replacing table tags with div tags. It’s about separating presentation from content. As soon as you can wrap your brain around that, then the stupid arguments like the one this guy raises are over. Maybe it’s because I come from a print background that it’s easy for me to understand. In print design, a client gives you copy, usually in Word. Then you to go InDesign (or QuarkXPress or PageMaker or whatever) and you set up your page. You set the margins, colors, type styles, headings, background graphics, etc. and everything else that separates a designed page from a Word file. Then, when your master sheets are in decent working order you bring in the actual text and massage as necessary. Same thing for the web. How a page looks is different than what it says. How it looks should *enhance* what it says, not drive content or worse, be confused with content.
Believe it or not, it’s okay to have tables in a standards-compliant website. Really, it is. If you have tabular content, then by all means it should be in a table. But how that table looks (does it have alternating colored bars, a border, etc.) is presentation and therefore should be styled with CSS. Only people who misunderstand the concept will believe that tables are taboo in a web standards compliant site. The goal is to separate content from presentation, XHTML/CSS is simply how you attempt to get there.
As further proof of just how much this guy doesn’t get it, take a look at his regular FAQ page here. He uses images for the questions!?! No meaningful alt text in the img tags, either. What does that mean? Well, aside from accessibility (no one hiding images or using a screen reader will have a clue what he’s talking about) it means that he’s made this page useless to a search engine, in particular the most popular one. Try it and see with his first question: “Can I take my existing templates and convert them over to nested templates” (I know from my server logs that people often type in full questions as Google search criteria). Where’s his site with the answer? Nowhere in the first 5 pages of results, I can tell you that. Well, I’m not being fair…let’s search for it with quotes to narrow it down. After all, if I were selling this product, I would want people who were interested in converting old templates to nested templates to be able to find me. No results found. Why? Because Google can’t read images. Duh! Had he used a technique like Fahrner Image Replacement or a similar technique (CSS to show the formatted font image but the actual text is still there and hidden from display in the browser) in a headline (or subhead-type) tag I’m certain he would have been at the top of the results.
Separating content from presentation means that you let the content drive the presentation and not the other way around. If your copy is a headline or subhead, then present it as a headline or subhead. Why did he want his questions to appear much larger and in a different font? Because it matters, silly. If you present your subhead as if it were part of the paragraph (as this guy did) then how will the search engines and readers (both with and without human eyes) know what’s important to you?
bq. Separation of Structure and Content via CSS makes things more organized.
ORGANIZED or SCATTERED? Just how does this make a web page more organized? AND, does this so-called organization really save time and money? When you have this piece of this page here and that piece there and that piece other there for “modularity”, you are eventually going to have to put it all together in your head to understand what’s going on in the first place And that’s going to take a lot longer in billable hours as all the code scattered all over the place. It removes many of the benefits of wysiwyg as now it’s a scavenger hunt!
So you’re telling me that tons of tr and td tags and other meaningless presentation markup in the middle of your content is easier to understand and follow than code that simply says “Here is my headline” and “Here is my body copy” and the visual presentation backs that up? Look at Zeldman’s site that he continually rips on. Which site is more pleasing to the eye? Which site is easier to follow? Which site makes you think “scattered”? Now “view source” and ask yourself the same questions. Case closed.
