[thelist] arguments pro css & xhtml / con tables

Bob Meetin orpc at frii.com
Sun Jun 11 10:35:13 CDT 2006


Thanks to all for the responses.  "glaze over" came through well.  First 
thing first - you have to sell yourself on the purpose/reason of 
improving your skills such that you "can" go this route; once you become 
a believer then you (in this case - me) need to wisely convey the 
benefits/message to your audience.  The first response was a great 
summary - I paraphrased  it with some of the others and mine:

Just tell them you'll build them :

1) a fast-loading site
2) search engines will love (this needs some qualification - i.e. search engine friendly vs search engine optimized) your site
3) it will be easy (and inexpensive) to update and 're-skin' whenever needed
4) we use the current best-practice web development practices
5) it will be "accessible" to your clients

Don't sell clients standards - sell only the benefits.

Client statement(s) - I've done this in FrontPage or Dreamweaver and it only took me a couple hours - why are you charging so much? "or" I used yahoo site builder (or other) and it only cost $30/mo.  My neigbor's 15 yr old son designs sites ....

Response - Provide detail only as needed. Perhaps have an example of several poorly devleoped sites at your fingertips - be prepared to "overview" why they are broken.

Hidden probe - So why aren't you doing that now?  Why are you coming to me?

Table vs CSS debate - It's somewhat a debate whether/not or perhaps how much a table-less design (tabular data aside) is better for accessibility. Speed of download and ease of update ought to carry the vote for CSS.

* Comment/History - I just took on a project for a tax professional.  He was dead set on using one of the various services which provides web sites for his business type as he didn't want to write articles/FAQs himself and they provide this info as well as embeded links to US Govt tax forms and such.  That is a (pehaps the) benefit. Several of these outfits use "frames", easy to just say no to them. The one we chose uses an in-house site manager tool to manage inclusions, links, etc.  Although I can "fix" the basic pages, home, about, why, etc, many of the linked pages are really out of my control as they will get overwritten upon publish - this includes newsletter, FAQ's, etc. It would take me hours to write scrips to strip out the unnecessary markup. They have used tables and precise widths of tables and td's.  Pages are not xhtml compliant, very heavy on tables, undoubtedly not accessible for many other reasons other than tables such as default javascript navigation.  

Impact - lots of hours to make this right from my perspective. The average client sees output, benefits of these services, would likely balk at my timecard for fixing this. At what point do you "punt"?

* Other note - general page structure something like:

Home link
** Site map (I like to have this available in the masthead and footer)
Skip navigation link
Navigation
Content
Footer/Redundant Top Level Navigation

* Referenced resources:

http://maccaws.com/kit/
http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/index.html
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000266.php
http://jessey.net/blog/archive/entries/?id=144
http://www.7nights.com/asterisk/archive/2004/06/web-standards-roi
http://www.webstandards.org/learn/articles/web_standards_for_business/
http://www.maccaws.org/kit/way-forward/#benefits 

PS - If you're interested, why not download the trial version of JAWS
from Freedom Scientific, turn off your monitor and have a shot?

You'll need to use Ctrl+Home to get to the top of a page, Insert+Down
Arrow to read all automatically, F6 for links list and F7 for headings list.

Modern versions of JAWS have gotten rid of the need to explicitly
activate forms mode, and are easier than ever to use.

See also 
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/publicwebsite/public_rnib003593.hcsp
  and http://www.webaim.org/techniques/jaws/keyboard-shortcuts







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