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JANUARY 19, 2004 Web standards: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
No transparent PNG support in IE for Windows. Still. Dammit. PNG is the current standard for Web images as recommended by the W3C and, naturally, as such is fully endorsed by the Web Standards Project. So it really bites the big one that Microsoft hasn't fully implemented PNG support into IE. Specifically, PNGs with alpha channels aren't allowed. Every other modern browser lets you use PNGs with alphas, and MS's omission is the logical primary reason why the Web is still littered with the ancient GIF and JPEG image formats. For example, on my own site, each section has a different dominant color, with a slightly screened logo image placed within the colored area. It would have been great to have a single, semi-transparent PNG file that blended itself into whatever background color was present on the fly, but I figured it would be a bad call to do that considering that IE has 95% (or whatever) of the browser market, and IE doesn't support PNG files with alpha channels. So there are five versions of my logo that get loaded at one point or another. Wasteful? Sure. Avoidable? Absolutely? Ticked? You bet. Thanks, MS![an error occurred while processing this directive]The ugly While the good is very good, and the bad is even tolerable, there are a couple of uglies to throw into the mix -- wild cards that can either be ignored or fretted about, depending on your situation: CSS is cool, but patience is required. CSS, for all its potential, requires a sometimes unholy amount of tweaking to make things appear as they should across all browsers. So much so at times that I was having some serious flashbacks to the bad old days of the browser wars, when everything would look right in one browser and be horribly broken in another. Fix, test, re-fix, re-test, lather, rinse, repeat. It's very easy to repeat this bastardized cycle, at least initially, with CSS. Some browsers have different levels of support with some CSS properties, and I found while getting my feet wet that trial and error was the rule, and not the exception, to getting things looking right in every modern browser. I even needed a Macintosh IE 5-only hack to get the navigation positioning correct (the nav elements were formed from a simple list, rollovers and all) to make IE on the Mac play along with IE Win, Mozilla, and Opera. Odd. Expect a lot of initial frustration as you learn which properties to avoid. Many options and no "right" answers. What may be daunting to some is that Web standards, when you get right down to it, is a concept more than anything else. Sure, there are a set of technologies that constitute the standards, but you can mix and match on the fly with existing methods. Ultimately, the choice is up to you, the designer, as to how loosely or strictly to implement available standards, and it's quite possible to come up with something that embodies the worst parts of the old and the new. So just be warned that standards are a sliding scale, with lots of built in tolerance for legacy stuff present in various browsers. I'd recommend on new projects going as much as possible with a standards-based design, and if you can't, stick with what you know. Save your standards experiment for a project that can best take advantage of what standards have to offer and start your journey from there. Once you're comfortable with standards, though, you'll likely find yourself backtracking to past projects and retrofitting them, at least in your head. MS could spoil the party at any time. The elephant in the room, as usual, is Microsoft. They've played pretty nice with all these adorable little standards so far, but they can just take their ball and go home if the whim grabs them. Of course, the more designers and developers code to standards, and the more tools take advantage of them, the less say Microsoft may ultimately have. So the race is definitely on. Why designers should care I'll go with the television analogy for this one. The broadcast industry is based on standards. In North America, we have NTSC. Most of Europe is on PAL. Other parts of the world use one or the other, and there's even SECAM thrown into the mix. All, however, are a set of rules and guidelines for creating broadcast-ready content. Many, many manufacturers create compatible products for both the creation and the viewing of this content, because standards exist that everyone has agreed on. Sure, the industry is shifting towards HDTV, but there are standards for that too, and at the end of that transition, there will be many manufacturers still creating compatible products for the creation and viewing of HDTV content. Just as you wouldn't want to have to go to a single company for tools to produce and view broadcast programs, you ideally wouldn't want to be locked into a single source to create and view Web content. Having viable Web standards ensures that there are choices in how you produce and view Web sites. For the designer, choice at the production end is a great thing. You want to use a text editor? Fine. A specialized CSS generator? Great. A WYSIWYG site building tool? Go for it. And you'll likely have your choice of software developers as well. Same on the browser end. That's what Web standards are good for, and why you should at least give an effort to learn how to use them. Just think about the alternative. Another big reason designers should care is because design is a part of the process again. Coding to standards means true separation of design and content, letting the development folk work on the back end while you use CSS to control how things look on the front end. This becomes especially important when you're dealing with huge sites with thousands upon thousands of pages, and you can spend your time working on the design of a site without getting bogged down into the minutia of tag replacement just to implement a fresh look. As for me, my first real foray into the world of Web standards will not be an isolated one, as I've found that whatever problems exist with standards-based markup are far overshadowed by the problems it solved. And while there were some definite fits and starts in terms of re-training my brain to work within the standards model, in the end, I was able to build a small site that didn't compromise on my initial Photoshop mockup, validated to the W3C's XHTML transitional specs, doesn't contain a single table tag, and (most importantly) is very simple to update and manage. Now, I know that this entire diatribe was borne of a single project, but at least the project in question was complete enough to give me an idea of whether I could even be "wired" correctly to undertake such a fundamental shift to the way I approach Web design (infrequent as it may be) from here on out. Web design may never be a true love of mine, but with Web standards it's a much, much more tolerable (and, at times, even enjoyable) process than it was in the bad old days of the browser wars. And that's all I ever could have hoped for. When not fleeing the paparazzi or spending his vast fortune associated with the fame and notoriety of being a DMN contributor, Kevin Schmitt can be found with his eyeballs glued to his computer screen, attempting to use some of the hardware and software he rants so incoherently about. An award-winning animator, artist and multimedia producer, he is currently a freelance designer located in the enormously bustling megalopolis of Waynesboro, VA. Whether you're looking to "give him the business" of either the figurative or literal type, feel free to drop him a line. He's ready to believe you! Prev 1 2 3 Related sites: • Creative Mac • Digital Media Designer • Digital Producer • Digital Webcast • The WWUG Related forums: [an error occurred while processing this directive] 
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