I’ve been critical of web design zealots for years now and have gotten into some pretty heated battles over what I would consider to be overly zealous interpretation and adherence to the all not-so-mighty Web Standards.

I don’t want to argue the issue again, but in a nutshell: I always felt it unwise to ignore the practical realities of the browsers actually being used in favor of the Web Standards. I argued that the Web Standards, though noble in thought, were not reflective of the reality on the ground. As such, I advised web designers (years ago) to pay much more attention to browsers that people used, rather than to the Web Standards and the W3C validator.

Heresy!!

“… When people start surfing the Web with the W3C validator, I’ll start testing my sites with it. In the meantime, I will test with IE and Firefox since that’s what people use!”

The forward compatibility myth and the Web Standards

One of the big arguments put forth by the Web Standards zealots was that if you follow the Web Standards, your pages would be “forward compatible” … your web pages would more likely render properly in web browsers that have yet to be created.

Well, recent evidence is showing me that these academic shills were wrong once again.

The PS3 web browser prefers tables!

Being a hardcore nerd, I went out and bought the best blu-ray player on the market: the PS3. One of the reasons I got the PS3, is that it is equipped with a web browser. Yes, I like to surf the Web on my big tv.

Anyway, what I’ve discovered is that the PS3 browser screws up only on ‘forward compatible’ Web Standard compliant web sites. Whereas with old school table based layouts – never a problem.

It seems to me that the fine people at Sony (like so many others) realized that there are hundreds of millions of pages that are built with old school techniques and that they better support them. One thing academic nerds can never understand: pragmatic business decision making. Instead, they are defenders of the faith and thus, are very dogmatic in their decision making.

… Reminds when IE7 came out and it broke all these ‘forward compatible’ websites because they were using CSS hacks rather than safe and sure (non standard) IE Conditional comments. Man, many CSS books had to be corrected and reprinted!

Conclusion

I think this post is best summed up by what one my assistants (and formally Web Standards zealot) said when he started actually having to produce web pages in the real life:

“It’s hard to believe that these zealots are actually building web sites!? … When you’re trying to follow the strict standards in real day to day work … it simply isn’t always practical.”

Happy new year!

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

I just wanted to first wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy holidays.

I haven’t been posting new blog entries … but I have an excuse! I’ve been busy working on putting up a brand new forum.

The old Java based forum was becoming a little too dated in terms of it’s features and the way it worked overall. It was showing its’ age.

Why not just update the forum software?

Believe me, I tried several times but for reasons I was not easily able to figure out, the new version of the forum just did not want to run on the live server. I could get it to work on my local development/testing machine … but not live.

So I then contacted the people who built the old forum and asked for assistance. To my surprise, they wanted 10-15 hrs of billable time to install their own forum software!

… I was willing to pay to have them do it, but 10-15 hrs to install a forum!! That’s nuts! Another classic example of Java’s tendency to over-engineer everything.

Sometimes it just makes sense to move on …

So I decided to start researching for a new forum given all the problems I was having, given that the forum had serious flaws to begin with and finally, when the people who built the thing want 10hrs+ to install it … it’s time to get the hell out!

Anyway, I researched and researched and finally found something that I liked. It is fast, modern, built with PHP and only takes 3 minutes to install … even if you never used it before!

I invite you to check it out: the new web designers forum at killersites.com.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

When looking at building web pages for cellphones, you have to consider a few options these days. Why? Because it is a moving target.

Moving target … what the heck does that mean?! Read on nerds to learn!

Way back, a long time ago …

In the old days, cellphones were only able to read pages built with a language called WML. WML is short for: Wireless Markup Language.

WML is basically HTML for cell phones. Along with WML, the nerds in power also came up with a Javascript-like language for cellphones called WMLScript. I am mentioning WMLScript for no particular reason other than to be complete. Anyway …

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