Web Standards Awards

WSA Winner

---

---

#1

Couldn't agree more - this is the site that made me want to find out more about web standards.

What I love about the design is the attention to detail. He's thought about everything and it shows.

Surely there can't be any "why is this getting an award?!" whiners with this one?... ;o)

Posted by Jon Hicks :: March 11th, 2004 at 10:06 AM

---

#2

As usual an attention to detail has been missed and teh primary navigation is flawed on IE 5 on a MAC running OS9 ... deary, deary me ... who gives out these awards?

Posted by Graham Sanders :: March 11th, 2004 at 12:35 PM

---

#3

not bad design, but no more blog type sites ;)

Posted by gray :: March 11th, 2004 at 02:29 PM

---

#4

I would agree also, just because it was one the pioneer websites in getting standard-base moving forward. Bowman has done a great job in conveying that to everyone through his own site and sites he has done. Just look at his code. It speaks for itself.

Posted by blakems :: March 11th, 2004 at 04:34 PM

---

#5

Hi Graham,

Being a Mac user myself, I can understand your interest in cross platform compatibility. However, please remember that IE5 on OS9 is a very old, buggy browser, with an extremely low (and shrinking) market share.

As far as I see it, one of goals behind web standards is to build to a standard, not to a browser. To future proof your sites, rather than being tied to old, outdated and buggy user agents. Obviously you still need to consider users, using old technology as much as possible (by making sure the site content is accessible), but it shouldn't force you to design for the lowest common denominator.

As such, it's not the site that's broken, it's your browser, and your criticism would be better aimed at the browser manufacturers.

There are a number of OS9 browsers that have much better standards support than IE5, so it may be worth while looking at upgrading. I can understand why you may wish to stick to using an old browser, as it's something your comfortable with. But you then have to appreciate that not all sites will display exactly as they would in more modern, standards complaint browsers.

Posted by Andy Budd :: March 11th, 2004 at 06:50 PM

---

#6

Hi Andy

Thank you for your comments. The majority of what you say I naturally agree with.

However, your comment regarding my browser, IE 5.0 I'm afraid I can't accept as the fundamental purpose of a site is to be easily useable by the end user, thus taking into consideration older browsers and older technology and thus taking due care and atention to make any necessary fixes. (which in the majority of cases are minor repairs). Several sites already listed that have taken this into consideration this whilst building their sites and thus are more due an award as they meet your criteria of usability and accessibility. Maybe you would prefer to delete these and instead replace them with longevity?

Kind regards
GS

Posted by Graham Sanders :: March 11th, 2004 at 11:11 PM

---

#7

Before people started to adopt web standards, it would be very common to design to the lowest common denominator. This meant designers were forced to spend a disproportionate amount of their time accommodating the buggy behaviour of minority browsers. Now this to me, seems like madness. Spending possibly 80% of your resources to accommodate less that 1% of your visitors, and in doing so, potentially breaking your site for future users.

I agree that site usability is important, but to what lengths should designers go to, to accommodate old and out of date technology. Just because there are still floppy drives around, do you think every computer company has to install floppy drives in their computers? There comes a point at which, supporting old, buggy, minority technology becomes a liability.

This is why web standards are so important. The idea is that you publish to a standard, not a browser/platform, and it's incumbent on the browser manufacturers to get things right.

Because of their extremely small (and shrinking) market share, many web developers have stopped developing sites with IE4 or NN4 in mind. It's important that the content is still accessible to these browsers, but it's not reasonable to expect the pages to display identically. I'd say the same was true of IE5 on OS9.

Access to the content is important, because there are people out there with no option but to use outdated browsers. However, for those of us who have the ability, and especially those of us with an interest in web standards, it's important that we upgrade to modern browsers. They are free of charge and readily available, so why not. Complaining that a site doesn't work on an out of date platform is like complaining that your CD's don't work on your record player!

Now I've not personally looked at the site in IE5 on OS9. Despite being a Mac user, I uninstalled IE5 a long time ago. However I'd imagine (stop me if I'm wrong) that the problems you're experiencing in the Nav bar are display problems, not functionality problems. Probably to do with IE5's poor handling of floats. However, the important thing isn't that the site looks identical to you as it does to somebody with a modern browser. The important thing is that the content is accessible.

Part of the job of a web designer is to understand the medium they are working in, and realise that layouts can't be pixel perfect on every browser. It's also important to attribute blame correctly. If something doesn't work on an old, buggy, minority browser, it's more likely to be the fault of the browser manufacturers than the designer. Sure, the designer needs to make the site as accessible as possible, but it's unrealistic to think that every browser bug can be accommodated, and unfair to blame the designer for the failings of a particular browser.

There has been an awful lot of nit picking in recent comments which I think is sad. It's extremely easy to look at a finished site and find the odd problem. It's much, much harder to build such good, usable, accessible and standards complaint sites in the first place. All of the site's we've featured have been of an extremely high standard and all worthy of their awards.

Posted by Andy Budd :: March 12th, 2004 at 09:25 AM

---

#8

Well put Andy. Although, I was telling someone the other day that considering the level of web-standards support in modern browsers, the blame for incompatibility issues can more than likely be placed with the web developer instead - outside of the 'standard-compliant community' of course. ;) In this particular case though, we can all agree that the browser is at fault. But placing blame isn't helping anyone.

Graham, I just loaded the website into Netscape 4.8 (ack) under WinXP - and I found it perfectly usable, despite there being no presentation layer. Which quite honestly doesn't phase me in the least when I'm visiting the site for it's content apposed to visuals. That said, you never mentioned the flaw you were experiencing with the navigation? I suspect it's purely visual and you're just nit-picking.

Talking of longevity... wouldn't you rather have a website compatible with browsers 5 years from now rather than those from 5 years ago? I think your clients will appreciate the value in taking this successful approach of forward-compatibility, instead of having their website built for a web browser that was released 4 years ago and subsequently discontinued last year. Having said that however I do also believe that completely ignoring the older web browsers is just as ignorant as exclusively developing for them.

The forward vs. backward-compatibility debate will continue forever it seems, I tend to believe that every case is different so there can never be a simple solution. Put users first - judge each website individually based on it's target audience. And in this particualr case, Stopdesign's visitors are more than likely using a modern browser. So one (claimed) visual navigation flaw in a 4-year old web browser isn't harming anyone.

Posted by coda :: March 12th, 2004 at 01:28 PM

---

#9

Ya know, I look at some of these posts and wonder what the big gripe is. When I hear "Web Standards Award" I think of sites that function properly and look pretty consistent in browsers that support Web Standards.

If your browser doesn't support standards well, why are you griping that the standards used to build the site are do not render the same as browsers that do?

Posted by Keith Burgin :: March 12th, 2004 at 03:50 PM

---

#10

"This meant designers were forced to spend a disproportionate amount of their time accommodating the buggy behaviour of minority browsers."

I don't see how Web standards solved this problem. Oh, wait! In fact, they didn't!

"Spending possibly 80% of your resources to accommodate less that 1% of your visitors, and in doing so, potentially breaking your site for future users."

Consider that a lot of design and communication professionals' browser of choice is IE5 on OS 9: people working on DTP, copywriters, editors, publishers. If you are a designer as well, and your site is your personal showcase as well (like stopdesign for Bowman) I don't see a profitable situation in leaving them behind 'cause of a sloppy browser.

~Neko

Posted by Neko :: March 13th, 2004 at 05:29 PM

---

#11

In 5 years, the web is going to be a very different place, and people are now getting ready for that. I think that is what is being said.

Also, hopefully for Apple, people will be moving away from their Mac OS 9 systems. But, as we all know, Macs last a long time before their are just no good in one way or another, rather than PCs. Mac OS X offers much more in web browsing, people just have to get onto the platform.

Posted by Danny Cohen :: March 14th, 2004 at 03:53 PM

---

#12

Andy - I don't mean to be "nitpicky" but you guys have pointed out several times now that you don't think it's right that people are posting critical comments. At first I didn't mind it, this is your site after all. But really, what else do you expect people to say? This is an anonymous forum where all there is to do is talk about web sites. It's going to come up! If you don't want critical comments, disable them. That's they only way you'll avoid them. It's one of the reasons I chose not to have comments on my site, and I'm confident it was the right decision. Then again, what's so beneficial about a bunch of back-patting and in-crowd congratulating anyway? Wouldn't that only serve to make designers complacent? Even though I do think you should look at both the good and bad in everything and give both their due, the designers know these sites aren't perfect. But this is like the 10th time it's been brought up by you guys that people are being negative. When you invite people to give their opinion you can't just turn around and scold them for it, no matter how baseless said opinion may be. So, either get over it or disable comments. Stop talking about it.
By the way, love the site and keep up the good work :)- Adam
WeeklyStandards.com

Posted by Adam :: March 15th, 2004 at 05:21 AM

---

#13

I think the point that's being made is that comments will only benefit us and new visitors if they're constructive, ie. saying something along the lines of "it doesn't work! standards suck!" won't prove useful to anyone. And if the discussion were left at that without further opinions, I figure it would stand that everyone agrees, which isn't the case as proven above. We all learn from each other, after all.

Posted by coda :: March 15th, 2004 at 03:42 PM

---

#14

Hmmm, I've just looked at this using IE 5 on OS 9, and I can't see ANY problems. The only difference is that the fonts aren't anti-aliased, thats ALL I can see.

When Graham refers to the 'primary navigation is flawed', perhaps he could point out what the flaw is? I wonder if you're mistaking the lack of word spacing in the right column headings as a flaw, rather than as the style?

I'm sorry, but all that ".. deary, deary me ..." stuff really winds me up. It would be more helpful to describe the problem...

Posted by Jon Hicks :: March 15th, 2004 at 03:52 PM

---

#15

Judging from Doug's code, my guess is that the top navigation will dissapear in IE 5.0 for macintosh because he nested a block element inside of a float. (I would need to actually test to verify this, however).

From what I remember, the particular browser successfully rendered the imfamous "acid test" and the development team (lead by Tantek) believed the browser would handle real world situations without significant errors. Rendering bugs like these put a dent in the browsers reputation, but most of these issues were fixed in IE 5.1 and 5.2.

I have dealt with this bug before and had to work around it because (oddly) all the copywriters (at the school I was doing work for) used the particular browser on their 7200's (I since stealthily updated their browsers to IE 5.1).

Drawing upon Andy's point, I should note that my work-around inhibited upon the usability of the site for all browsers. I had to set the nested elements' display to inline which caused their width to be variable (when I wanted it to be fixed). Setting the width of an inline element to 100% would break in IE5/PC.

If Doug is dealing with the same rendering issue, I would commend him for respecting future compatiability.

Complex layouts will always have issues with these older browsers. I suppose that if we all designed with percentage-measured (NN4 can't handle pixel-defined measurements), absolutely positioned divs, our sites would work well with Netscape 4.08 too (so long as the browser doesn't crash).

-Kevin

Posted by Kevin Davis :: March 18th, 2004 at 08:24 PM

---

#16

No - the top navigation worked fine. Still can't see what the big problem was...

Posted by Jon HIcks :: March 19th, 2004 at 08:05 PM

---

#17

The fault on MAC IE 5.0 appears when you rollover any of the primary navigation eg when you rollover "Experiments" the text highlights in white and a block of blue covers "See Also". This is a simple fix and I for one can't understand why it was missed but at least the site doesn't have immediate noticeable scrolling problems like: www.hicksdesign.co.uk

I have already sent a snapshot of this flaw to Doug and hope that he fixes this bug which he inadvertently missed.

Posted by Graham Sanders :: March 20th, 2004 at 08:38 AM

---

#18

Ah but Graham, I fixed the scrolling quirk especially for you!

;o)

Posted by Jon Hicks :: March 20th, 2004 at 09:52 PM

---

#19

Well done John but you've still got that weird search box positioning and arrow disappearing thing going on ... do you want some snapshots?

Posted by Graham Sanders :: March 20th, 2004 at 10:43 PM

---

#20

Adam, in an earlier comment, hinted at criticism of this site's whole reason-to-be, when he asked, "What's so beneficial about a bunch of back-patting and in-crowd congratulating anyway?". While I love both this site and Doug Bowman's too, I have to chime in with concerns of a similar complexion.

In showcasing such well-known sites as Stopdesign, Hicks Design and Happy Cog, not only is a great opportunity being missed, but also you are inadvertently encouraging (what I believe to be) a growing association of web standards with an 'in-crowd', a select group of designers and their sites - a criticism I find implied in much of the so-called "Standards Angst" I have read about lately.

The sites above are all eminently worthy, and personally, I think that it's hard to quantify the sheer magnitude of the positive influence that designers such as Jeffrey Zeldman has had upon the web design in recent time (and quite often, it's not due to Zeldman's production of tons and tons of well-known sites; more often than not it's because of his unusual eloquence, and a generosity of spirit often lacking amongst designers).

But, the fact that you often seem to know the designers upon whom you are bestowing your accolades, and the fact that the number of sites you choose to recognise at a given time is rather limited (understandably), does rather make for the impression that you're all about sending props out to your mates and best buddies.

This may be untrue, but more damaging than that might be the charge that you're not really looking far enough out into the web in your site choices. Really, most people who know about standards know about Stopdesign, Hicks Design and Happy Cog. They are already much frequented by people who are concerned about web standards, and for good reason (mostly). The rest of us often want to see new sites and new designers, because we want to believe that web standards are not for a select, exclusionist group.

Please consider the wider consequences of your choices here, and what they say to the majority of your readers. Please consider your role of reflecting WEB standards, and try to champion less well-known sites in your awards, sites that employ standards with just as much care and flair, and save your praise of these well-known sites (and really, we do all know them) for your blogs.

Posted by Martin :: April 9th, 2004 at 01:24 PM

---

#21

I often visit Stop Design and I like it a lot. It's user friendly, and I'd say it has a perfect look and feel. And they always post interesting information. I really think they deserve the Web Standarts Award.

Posted by Crystal :: June 3rd, 2004 at 09:41 PM

---