Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Jim:

About a year ago I stumbled onto Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign site and
was amazed. The HTML was so clean and logical and the site looked
fantastic. I started reading more about XHTML, CSS, and web standards and
got interested in the work of Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Cederholm.

The Examiner site was a jumble of nested tables and spacer gifs back
then. However, I wasn’t ready to take the full plunge at that point. I
had too much trouble making the CSS work the way I wanted it to and it
was frustrating that it seemed to work differently in every browser. I
settled for a table-based site with more CSS than I had been using
previously.

A few months ago, The Examiner decided to open the site to
advertising. That meant a total redesign, so I decided that I might
as well make it fully standards-compliant with no tables for layout.
It’s been a challenge. Things that were so easy to do with tables seemed
next to impossible with CSS. Sometimes I just had to abandon ideas
because it wasn’t worth the hassle. I think that turns out to be a good
thing because it kept things simple.

Jim:

That’s hard to say since it was done in phases over the last year. Plus,
the current design is sort of Version 2 of the XHTML/CSS site. I’d
created one previously and it had been up for a couple months, but I was
really unhappy with the way it looked so I started over again. That’s
the great thing about CSS. You just throw away the old style sheet and
start over.

That’s the great thing about CSS. You just throw away the old style sheet and start over.

Jim:

I wish I had, but I didn’t. Like I said before it was done in stages so
there wasn’t a startling change at any one point.

Jim:

The response from other Web designers has been great. I’ve received many
complimentary e-mails and Jeff Veen and Douglas Bowman have linked to
the site.

One person was a little confused about the fact that he didn’t have to
click on a link to get a printer-friendly page. I’m still not sure if he
got it sorted out. Otherwise, I haven’t had any feedback from readers,
which might be counted as a positive since most readers only e-mail to
complain or ask for help. Since no one had done that recently, my guess
is that things are working pretty well.

Jim:

The main thing from my perspective is that it’s so much easier make
changes when all you have to do is make a single edit on a stylesheet.
If I decide that I want to add an extra pixel of space after a paragraph
I can do it in a minute and I don’t have to edit every page of the site.

Jim:

We use a custom CMS that I built from the ground up last year. Since I
have full control over how things are output, I can make sure it’s valid.
Also, there is almost no HTML written directly into each article, so
it’s not that hard to make sure invalid markup doesn’t creep in.
However, with thousands of stories, I’m sure there are a few tags in all
caps or img tags that aren’t closed somewhere. I’ll try to
clean those things up when I have time.

Jim:

Standards is what got me interested in Web design again after feeling
frustrated with it for some time. I’m now convinced that this is the
direction that more and more sites, especially newspaper and other media
sites, should be moving in.

Standards is what got me interested in Web design again after feeling frustrated with it for some time.

It will be interesting to see whether the non-technical decision makers
will embrace it, reject it, or just not care about it. My guess is that
if a majority of Web designers start treating valid XHTML and CSS as the
de facto professional standard, their bosses or the people hiring them
will accept it without complaint.

However, if designers who use standards are a minority, the decision
makers, especially those still using Netscape 4.7, won’t understand the
advantages. They’ll just see that the person using Frontpage can make a
site that works on their browser and the person using CSS can’t.

As for The Examiner, my goal now is to fine-tune the site. I’m
currently reading 37 Signals’ Defensive Design for the Web and I’m
trying to incorporate some of those ideas into
examiner.com. I’ve also
re-launched our sister paper’s website, sfindependent.com, with the same design as The Examiner.