W3C standards unmasked
The dreaded W3C standards; This is a topic I’ve been meaning to write about for a while now. With the official launch of Hotcakes New Media, it’s an issue that is once again at the forefront of my decision making process. What the hell is W3C? Why does it matter? And why does it annoy me so much? Read on.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web.
So what does that mean? It means that they are the organization that dictates what standards to use for web programming. But more importantly, why is it relevant? The main advantage to W3C compliancy is to ensure proper functioning code, and address accessibility concerns. For example, W3C requires you to have alternate text on all your images. That way, if a blind person visits your site, the “images” are labeled properly for their screen reader, and they can navigate the site and get a sense of what you’re protraying graphically.
There are a number of people who are all hung up on W3C compliancy with websites. I’ve been “called out” on it a few times. Most of the time, it’s from people who don’t really understand what W3C compliancy is, and more importantly, don’t understand programming and browser compatability. You see, the idea of standards compliancy is better on paper than the reality of putting it in practice. Unfortunately, Microsoft is guilty of flooding the browser market with their sub-par Internet Explorer 6. The browser is over 8 years old, and still in major use (over 40% of the browser market). The problem is that moving to full W3C compliant code on a website means making compromises to your design or functionality as a result of bad IE6 rendering.
Think of it this way: What if you were a writer who was forced to write proper English all the time? Getting across a French accent would not be “dat heasy witout da mis-spellings”. Sometimes you need to break the rules in order to make a better quality product.
Case in point: The Hotcakes New Media website is W3C compliant. In order to get my site W3C certified, I had to make changes to the functionality of the site. The main animation on the site is a Flash video. W3C states that the older Flash “object” code is not acceptable, so I’m forced to use Javascript to load the Flash elements. Now, anyone with Java disabled will not see the website properly. W3C forced me to make a decision: Show my site as intended to a large number of viewers, or comply with W3C and reduce the number of viewers.
In many cases, it is a more difficult decision. Because of how IE6 renders code so poorly, the choice becomes “hacking” the code to make my nice graphical design look right in IE6, or follow standards and degrade the graphical appeal of the site. As a designer, being forced to compromise your potential just to maintain a mostly irrelevant “certification” is a tough pill to swallow.
My personal approach with Hotcakes New Media is to strive to get W3C compliancy, but I accept a minimal level of invalid code if the benefits outweigh the negatives. Every site I design “starts out” W3C compliant; I design it for Firefox and Safari, and follow all W3C standards. The site passes certification, and is then tested in other browsers. If I need to do anything to make it work in other browsers, or I need a plugin that will significantly increase the user experience, I make the changes and test for W3C again. If it fails, I look at why. If I can get around it, I do. If not, at least I’m assured that the main reason for W3C, accessibility for the impared, is valid and taken care of.
So that’s my rant for the day. 
Hope you enjoyed the geekery.
A7
Tags: a7, art, compliancy, design, Geek, ie6, programming, w3c, web