Comments on: A Proper Web Standards Education: Part 3

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:34:44 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys. And yes, you are right Ben, in that my statistics are potentially misleading, for exactly the reasons you state. But the number will still be worryingly low, even if you take this into account.

By: Ben Callahan

Ben Callahan — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:10:36 +0000

Great article Chris. I agree with the premise of this. However, the stat at the beginning of the article (4.13% of sites validate) is a bit misleading. I think there are more “standards aware” designer/developers out there. I’ve watched beautifully semantic sites that validate perfectly turn into validation disasters once a client is given control of the content through some kind of CMS. Does this mean that the site no longer validates? Yes. Does it mean that the core principles of web standards are not serving as a foundation for the site? No. The cost difference (for my organization) to make a site validate with *normal* content compared to making it validate forever with whatever a client can throw at it is huge.

I recognize that this is a separate problem and absolutely agree, but wonder if there really is a good way to measure this kind of thing.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:25:04 +0000

At Winchester School of Art the workshops I run with xhtml and css are all content out (Andy Clark transcending CSS is our core reading) and are very web standards focused :D

It much better from everyones point of view.

We teach basic simple chtml using text based editors I currently favour Netbeans but we have used Jedit in the past and use the macrabbit app CSS Edit to do the styling.

Thats my story, but I agree many lecturers and most students come in only knowing dreamweaver and creating visual layout in a way that creates terrible code that they cant fathom at all anyway.

Here is some online material I created/used last academic year for the practical work of starting to build a content out, clean markup site (needs revamping and I am looking at yours and the wasp stuff to boost it up) http://wsa.wikidot.com/techguides:xhtml

Prior to this students do design work creating static designs and focus on design using current skills with PS and Indesign.

Here is one students work from the class http://wsadirectory.org/

By: Daniel Lambert

Daniel Lambert — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:06:59 +0000

This is so true. Education is a big part of why people don’t create sites with web standards. At school I did a BTEC IT course which took up two GCSES everyone and I mean everyone got the top grade because it was so easy and all you had to do was make some stuff in Office. We did make a website but it was just open up Dreamweaver, make a table and that kind of stuff. Our teacher even told us that the different sections of a web page such as header, footer, main content etc are called frames. I was like WTF!! God, that class was so dumb I wished I took something more useful as it took like two years to complete and I learned nothing. Oh and our teacher also told us if we make an image in say Paint and saved it as a jpeg it would automatically be a vector!