I think I may be the only person on the planet who has set their web browser’s default color to a light gray (a la Netscape). The upshot of this is that when web pages don’t have a background color set, I see gray, when it’s clear from the rest of their design that they intended the page to be white.
It used to only happen with less-than-professional sites, but now it seems to be everywhere. Google does it. Sony is another example. I even have a feeling the Straight Dope 's webmaster thinks the front page is white, although it looks okay in gray.
I’ve been paid to design a few web sites, but I wouldn’t consider myself a professional web designer. However, I would never leave a background color out of the CSS, and I would never put up a page without defining the doctype or validating the HTML and CSS.
So, am I way off-base in expecting big-time web designers to hold themselves to these standards? Or should I just set my background color to white, stop stewing and get some fresh air?
I don’t like the entire system of browser vs. web page control struggles.
Every time I get a browser fix for some problem the web pages find a way to recreate it.
For example, I found out how to make a favorite ou of a sub page to a store site.
I wanted to go directly to the credit card payment section, rather than always having to watch the opening video.
But they found a way to defeat my browser.
Then the browser got smart enough to remember my name and password, and they changed the page again to force me to enter a 14-digit account number as well.
I think the browser people are on my side and the banks and stores don’t like putting any control in the user’s hands. But the net result is that surfing is getting slower and more manual and less automatic every month. :sigh:
Wow…in running my web site through that validator, it turns out that I have a huge number of errors in my coding.
Thing is, the site looks just fine to me, nobody has ever complained, and I’m too damn lazy/busy with the weekly upkeep on it to go any try to live up to some arbitrary standards.
The W3C Standards are not arbitrary, although some do look a bit weird. Section 508 accessibility requirements are law for federal government web sites. However a 1996 DOJ opinion says Section 508 applies to state and local government web sites as well. The New York state AG says Section 508 applies to all web sites based within that state, regardless of ownership (can’t find cite).
Ultimately you are free to do what you want with your web site. But if your site is used to bring business (and revenue) to you, you would do well to make it available to as many people as possible with the least amount of fuss. Otherwise, that grand hotel and villa you just built with the great view will remain empty just because you don’t want build a decent road for folks to travel on to get to the place.
But also as a web developer, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had clients say “Just make it work with Internet Exploer”. Most clients don’t care about standards and functionalities; if the choice is between a particular gimmick that only works in IE, or ditching the gimmick for standards-compliance, Microsoft wins.
Sure, if you’re just doing simple HTML and some CSS, validate everything and obey every standard. If you’ve coded in PHP with a mySQL database, things get a little trickier as CSS and information is filled in dynamically. You have to fudge a bit.
And personally, I designed the entire website for the insurance company I work at. I was the lone designer, working with the IT department who did the back end in .NET, C#, and some database I’d never even heard of. We have a website set up for potential clients, for agents (to log in and check commissions, status reports, etc.), employees (to check on the newsletter, lunch menu, etc.), policy owners (to pay their bill, change their beneficiary, etc.), and a web admin interface so I don’t have to do ALL the updating. Every page is generated dynamically according to a given schedule and depending on who is viewing it.
At some point (and that point came a little more than a year after starting work on the site), you don’t care about standards and validation and yadda yadda. You care how it looks and how it acts on the majority of browsers. You pick your battles. The site I did works great in IE and FireFox on the PC, and FireFox and Safari on the Mac. It functions great but has messed up parts in Opera. IE on the Mac is a complete nightmare. Still, between me and the others working on the site, we got it working great on 97%+ of the systems out there. It probably wouldn’t pass any sort of validation (wouldn’t know, haven’t tried), but who cares? It works. That’s the most important part of a site.
