Go the Oz...
Wednesday, 20. February 2008, 19:54:31
Ben Buchanan, just quietly, is a great bloke. As well as being a choice companion for sharing a beer or three, nice guy, and champion of accessibility and other good things, he has actually done some really basic practical stuff that takes time to show results. And recently he announced something really cool...
Getting a big corporate to care about standards is, as Ben says, a long haul. Often I have been involved consulting to projects that were killed after only a year, not enough time to turn around a big website in many cases. So getting a major news site (The Australian is the national paper belonging to Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, with profile even higher than its curculation) to really validate is pretty cool.
Even more interesting is what he says about the process. It's not something you can walk in and do liike you can when you simply fix your personal home page or blog site. But it is something that has real benefits - perhaps even more so for a large and unwieldy organisation than for a 4-person startup, given that the major pain is nearly always in dealing with aberrations rather than the standards-based stuff.
So I am really very impressed. It's something of a shame that I can see this as a big achievement. After all, valid websites should be the norm, for all the reasons that convinced the guys at News, and importantly their partners. Sadly, the industry is still maturing and in too many places hasn't really got there yet. (As a comparison, telephones interoperate perfectly, because they follow standards - so building businesses based on voice calling doesn't include a lot of worrying about whether the sound actually arrives in the other telephone, and the money can be spent delivering better ways to annoy you by phone, or something).
All of which just adds to the glory still available, and the share that Ben (and the guys working with him) deserve... I look forward to seeing them carry on the roll-out, and the neat new things they will be able to concentrate on rather than maintaining unreadable code...
WIDGETIZE
Marjolein Katsma # 21. February 2008, 17:15
Surely the CMS must be the place to start.
So many CMSs are around that themselves still don't generate valid code, and few users of those CMSs know how to change that (if it is even possible at all!). Still, things are moving, slowly — for instance the new Joomla 1.5 produces much cleaner code than the previous generation (but many plugins still have to be adapted). The Drupal people are very aware of standards, but again it's plugins that can cause problems — and those are hard to fix. I'm playing with both Drupal and Xaraya (where I personally pushed to have it generate valid XHTML) at the moment.
Even if you don't consider plugins as "third party code" there are numerous services (free and otherwise) that give you code to include in your web site (statistics, people online, widgets, etc.) and they all say "don't touch our code". And in my experience in some 90% of cases that code is not valid. I've followed various strategies, from writing to their support stating I will not use their code unless I can change it enough to make it valid (without changing functionality) to changing it it anyway and leaving a message in my code for the "inspectors". When I wrote, reactions have ranged from "sure, and tell us what you did" (which I did, but they didn't change it) to total disbelief and denial. And where you are linking (not pasting) in third-party code, all bets are off: if they continuously tinker with it (like Google Adsense) you don't really know what you are linking in...
So it was great to read how Ben Buchanan was eventually able to even turn around the third-party code providers (which must be mostly advertisers), and they are getting the message. It would be great if the tinkerers at Google would follow that example.
Ben Buchanan # 6. March 2008, 11:27