[thelist] Are you designing with CSS and web standards?

[Russ]

> This just isn't true**, have a look at http://csszengarden.com/

No, but what is true is the amount of saturation of web standards across
organizations--not much.  I've read Zeldman and the book is a great read
with some great notions.  Everything has to start somewhere--he's right
about that.  Getting everyone up-to-speed on standards would be awesome,
however...

Reality sets in and there are such things as a variety of design and
development groups that are broken up into so many fragmented parts that
there are overlapping skills and sometimes even underlapping skills and
there are flavors of design and development all over the place.

What I'm getting at is that what some people call design, well, others
call it development.  There is plenty of difference between someone who
would be a "web designer" and someone who would be a "web
developer"--and I've seen plenty of web designers who couldn't actually
build a site, but sure as hell understood a strong majority of the
limitations that they could work within--and just to be certain, we
included some of the production and development folks to validate
designs coming down the pipe to make sure we weren't writing checks we
couldn't cash with our clients.

I also recall sitting down and swearing that my next site would be done
so that it would be standards compliant.

Then I recalled that someone else was paying the bill and someone else
had a deadline and the tiniest little delivery difference in
inappropriately using tables to deliver dynamic data versus trying to
implement, wiggle/waggle and fidget with a CSS table-less layout was
outlandish in the amount of dollars NOT spent trying to get up to speed
on standards.

That's not saying that I don't support standards or that I don't want to
use them (more), but it's saying that, in a lot of places, the
environments do not support the investment of the time & energy needed
to begin practical application of these standards.  Argue against it all
you want, but people have to have time to NOT do web design &
development in their lives, regardless of their commitment to standards
and best practices and that doesn't always allow for them to figure out
the tiniest little "cheat" (and how is it that a "cheat" is a standard?)
so that something works in Mozilla or whatever.

Standards really are great.  Truly.  I believe.  I support.  I, like a
lot of others, have not found it financially nor personal-time feasible
to make a deep-dive transition, but sure would love to.  Right after the
next project.  Really.  I swear.