So, why is this revelation new???

For instance,the area I work in is primarily web enabled applications. 90% of the work is Java server code (J2EE) that needs to connect to any number of back-end systems. The web interface is only one channel among many to access the system (others can include web services, messaging systems such as MQ-Series, file upload, etc.) As a result, when we come to the web interface, we are building a view that can represent and update the data we have in the system. And that data can be structured in extremely complex ways. So it is natural for us to design the interface around semantic data markup and efficient navigation. The design can come later and that design usually has to abide by very strict rules and cannot mess with the markup. At the end of the day, if it’s not visually pretty, it doesn’t matter, we’re talking banking applications after all. So in practice, the typical approach, as I am doing on my current project, is to start by producing a front-end that only has little or no styling. In my case, I currently have 5 rules in my CSS: one for the body tag and one for each of the 4 structural div tags to define their positionning. Once the most complicated screens work as expected, we can start thinking about real styling.

This sounds like an ideal situation to take into account accessibility and standards from the very beginning of a project. And I am hoping to do so on the current one. The caveat though is that in most situations, the developers on a project like this are Java/J2EE developers who only have a vague notion of HTML and are not aware of front-end issues. So, if the person who builds the front-end is one of the back-end developers, you usually end up with HTML tag soup; if the front-end is produced by web designers, they usually have a very hard time getting up to speed with all the custom tags required by the JSP/Struts/JSF pages they are dealing with that hook up the front-end to the back-end processes and you end up with designs that break when the back-end system unexpectedly returns data that is unusually complex.

Now, I can also see why you would design a web site the other way round: starting with the visuals and fitting in semantics as an afterthought. I reckon this is more typical of sites that deal with unstructured data, such as weblogs, news or marketting sites. The main problem with that sort of sites is that the data you are trying to display has little structure or has a structure that is subjective and depends on who is writing the content. For instance, two people writing a news article will have a different style and a different way to structure the data contained in their article. As a result, it can be difficult to build semantics that will ensure good accessibility.

All this to say that teaching wanabee web developers about semantics of the data they want to display before letting them loose on Photoshop is a good idea. In the long run, this should produce better designs because they will be based on an understanding of the data rather than a partial view of it. As someone famous said before me: the map is not the terrain, it is only a visual representation of it. If you understand the terrain (data and its semantics), you will be able to produce a better map (visual representation) of it.

One of my bugbears is that schools and colleges etc. don’t seem to have grasped this idea yet (and that is the ideal place to start if change is going to filter through).

Does anyone have examples of Schools or Colleges where they do work with web standards, and accessibility in mind?

The idea of learning to do everything one way, then un-learning all that and re-learning everything a different way… it never made sense to me. People seem to accept this method because it’s how most of us learnt, but it’s not the most logical way to learn.

We want to make it as easy for people to learn webstandards as humanly possible. If we teach them one way, then tell them that everything that they know is wrong, you will loose some to ‘the dark side’.

Make it easy and make it quick. Teach accessibility and semantics as the foundations off all webdesign courses.

Very accessible. But then we’d bugger things up with table layouts, font tags, and image rollovers and headings

Nowadays we just slap on a few wrapper divs and ids, and write the CSS instead, and avoid the buggering-up bit.

Of course, my experience might not be represent the usual abuse of templates.

Jake.