Catching web standards

Last night I went to a fantastic Web Standards Group meeting, where Peter Ottery discussed the Sydney Morning Herald's transition to XHTML and CSS (this is the number one media site in Australia with over 4 million unique visitor each month. Goes to show that this stuff works in the real world.). I came home to find my girlfriend (she doesn't like the term "partner"), who has been doing some very cool web related stuff, had written a lovely little tale.

So, for a change from my usual rants, read on.

I am not the usual sort of person who writes about web standards. I'm the kind of girl who'd rather write about a royal wedding. I'd rather write about my kitty. Until recently I was part of what might have been kindly termed the Clueless Majority. However, here I am to tell those of you who do not think it can happen, that it is possible to get a Luddite interested in web standards and have that affect their commercial decisions.

I am John Allsopp's girlfriend. To let you know how far I've come, this was about my level of knowledge when John and I started going out a couple of years ago:

In one of our first conversations I described myself to him as doing 'on-line stuff' for one of my firm's websites. This meant I cut and pasted text into our CMS. Not that I knew it was called a CMS, or if I had, what CMS stood for. I probably called it the web page thingy.

I had in my armoury an array of at least four HTML elements that I could use to jazz up our web pages. I could add a link, use <b> and <i>, and I knew what a <p> was.

When I started going out with John and was describing him to my friends who had not yet met him, I would vaguely refer to him as an 'internet billionaire'. I would then say something like "Have you heard of Cascading Spread (sic) Sheets? Yeah, Style Sheets, that's it! Well, he makes software which is something to do with that." For a while back there I actually thought John had invented CSS. Which, while I had no idea what it was, I knew would have been way cool.

Now, for all my many failings I am actually a pretty fast learner. So in the two years that we've been together I've managed to progress somewhat from my Clueless Majority beginnings.

A lot of my knowledge comes from being what I'll describe as a Developer's Widow. I'm sure there's a support group for us spouses of web developers out there - I must find out when they meet. We developers widows come home from our 9-5 jobs every day to find our partners tapping away at their computers, eager to show us the latest cool thing that their application can do, describing the political ins and outs of the blogosphere, ranting about the trolls on their mailing lists. We try to drag them out to buy groceries but before they go they simply must check their email for the 800 millionth time just in case something's happened. They marvel at those of us foolish enough to participate in the rat race. They ask what the weather was like outside. They are excited (though sometimes feel slightly confronted) to have a real person to talk to after a day in cyberspace.

In my post-work discussions with John I've managed to learn quite a lot. At first I just learned the buzz words so that I'd have some ability to comprehend what John was talking about. Otherwise John would have been to me as the teacher was to Charlie Brown in Peanuts "W3C blah blah blah, tables blah blah validation blah blah. Blah blah. I am not a zealot!"

For something to do in my spare time I did John's courses, which I have to say, were excellent. I started tooling around making my first website. I validated my code.

And something funny happened. I started to care about web standards. I realised that even though I am not some screen reader employing totally blind person, web standards affect me. I have a mixed astigmatism and my glasses are too dirty for me to wear at the moment. So when my favourite chicks websites set text in pixels instead of ems and I can't make it bigger it really bugs me. Lack of adherence to web standards is going to give me crows feet from squinting! This is bad.

I like to refer to my conversion as sexually transmitted web standards. Slightly more fun than the clap, but just as contagious.

Anyway, in my newfound enthusiasm, I managed to turn my boss, who knows even less than I did in the beginning, over to the idea of web standards. And - unlike John with me - I didn't even have to sleep with him. Here's how it happened.

As a bit of background I will say that I work for a firm that employs around 4,000 people. We have a huge website and most of the web development is done in-house. We are currently developing a new website specifically for our department. The developer I was working with initially built our site using tables, and when I pointed out that company policy was to use CSS, she got, shall we say, a little huffy. I knew I had to get my boss on side to influence her to do it over.

So I went in to him. "Boss", I said "you are not going to understand much of what I am about to say but you need to know that it's important and I will try to explain it to you as best I can."

He looked mildly alarmed.

I went on. "Imagine that you wanted me to send out a document on your behalf, and we have a lovely word processor there to use, but I created the document on a manual typewriter instead because I didn't know how to use the typewriter." He nodded. At this point I dropped the analogy "Well that's kind of what happened with our website. Someone who doesn't know how to use the new technology, CSS, has done it the old way, with tables. Now, it matters because people looking at our website on anything other than a computer - like on their mobile phone or a pda are going to have trouble understanding it."

I had him at pda. "No, that's no good!" he said "a lot of our audience will be on the road, they've got to be able to access it from anywhere."

"Not only that, but doing it with tables is going to cost us more money in bandwidth." At this point I launched into an elaborate explanation of bandwidth, which I will leave out of this narrative other than to say it involved complicated comparisons to crowded doorways, some Marcel Marceau impersonations, and left my boss blinking.

"AND" I moved in for the kill, "it's actually illegal in Australia to have this kind of website because we are discriminating against visually impaired people. People have been sued for this kind of stuff." Back came the expression of mild alarm. "PLUS" I drove it home, "if we want to make changes to the look of the site down the track we'll probably have to completely re-do the site, rather than simply being able to make a few simple cosmetic changes."

I paused for breath.

"So," Boss said, "this CSS. It costs more?"

"Well, only in that the developer may not know how to use the technology, and will have to be trained, so it may take her longer."

"Right. So you're saying if we use tables it's more expensive, potentially discriminatory and won't get to much of our audience. But it might take a little longer to do it with CSS. Is that right?" I nodded. "Well, I want the CSS! She's got to do it again!"

It was that simple. And you know what? The developer who huffed and puffed later confessed that she loved re-doing the site with CSS - saying it was so easy to work with. It took her a day to re-do it. My boss thinks he's a web guru. I feel smug. It was upside all-round.

Web standards are not only sexually transmitted. But if you believe in web standards and you're single, go on and talk about them to a cute member of the Clueless Majority. You may well have a convert, and you never know, you may just get lucky in the process.