Web Standards At Work

31 Aug 2004 12:35 AM

How many of you use web standards at work? I’m one of those developers that love the idea behind web standards, but rarely get to use them in the workplace. Clients are getting cheaper every day and the amount of time it takes to create accessible cross browser CSS layouts never seems to fit into the budget.

Recently, the company I work for landed a client (Autism Victoria) that had some minimal accessibility requirements. This was a good opportunity for us to educate the client on the business value of web standards and web accessibility.

The budget was pretty tight, but after a few discussions and compromises, an agreement was signed. I put in a few more hours than I wanted to and some parts of the code aren’t as good as they could have been. We all know perfect web design is a myth, and anyway, we’ve hooked the whole thing up to Macromedia Contribute, so god knows what the code is going to look like in a few weeks. Overall though, I’m pretty happy with the result and so was the client. Stylegala gave it a decent review and even Scrivs thought that it was noteworthy.

The latest project I’ve been working on also makes use of web standards. It’s for a new business my boss (er… I mean partner) and I are trying to start up. The actual product isn’t ready for prime time yet though. It basically helps conferences manage abstract submissions on-line. I was inspired to do a 3 column front page with 2 column sub-pages after seeing it put to amazing use over at Stopdesign. I was pretty happy with my initial drafts, but after everyone else (friends, co-workers etc.) had put their input into it, I really ended up disliking the final version. We’ve seen what happens when other “experts” give you their opinion. The funny thing is though, Scrivs actually thought this one was good enough to put into the vault. Go figure… I guess we all have different tastes.