Rogue

Today I spent a bit of my free time grappling with the problems of creating a standards compliant user experience in an environment where the delivery mechanisms are anything but. How can you provide unified/universal content to your target audience when no two clients will necessarily behave the same way?

Follow up:

I'm trying to port huge tracts of my archaic table based styling to correct CSS2 specification, yet am constantly frustrated when even the most fundamental attributes are either completely ignored by IE, or even worse behave in totally bizzare 1994 'I have the market share and can do what I want' fashions.

How can I help people with bad memories use my system when the simple acronym (abbreviation ; abbr) tags are ignored? How can I simplify my navigation by using lists (what they are there for), when IE ignores inline display.

Specifications are meant to give us a clean and cut set of boundaries within which we are able to be more creative than ever, with much simpler page building thanks to true seperation of content and style information. In this I think they succeed (with technologies such as PHP and Rose on Rails, proving that the implementation can work) but will forever remain stymied and avoided by developers when the final product can vary so wildly.

Were I building for 'the wild' (global internet) it wouldnt be a concern, as you can build for the highest denominator with a sufficient number of handlers for the odd cases and have a certain level of conformance requirements. However in the pocket worlds of corporate intranets you dont have the freedom of knowing the world keeps turning and that innovations get implemented. In the corporate world they might not upgrade their operating system for 10 years, and the web browser... pfft, forget it.

I know that this might seem like a perfect situation; you can build for the lowest common denominator using the simplest of methods. But building for the lowest common denominator means you are going to end up with that quality reflective in your own product. I don't want to work like it's 1994. It's like knowing you are an eagle, a lord of the sky, yet being put inside a fucking tent and told to do your thing.

So here I am. Stuck with limited structural mechanisms which renders my ability to maintain good fluidity and cross platform uniformity down to an almost non existant level. Building for the lowest common denominator, it's freakin amatuer hour up in here.

Anyway...

While reading one of Mark Newhouse's articles on 'A Line Apart' I just felt compelled to share. So here's a lengthy snippit regarding the 90s bubble which conveys my thoughts at the moment better than I can.

When I started designing websites, if the guy on the plane next to me asked what I did, I had to say something like “digital marketing” if I wanted to avoid the uncomprehending stare.

A few years later, if I told the passenger beside me I was a web designer, he or she would regard me with a reverence typically reserved for Stanley-Cup-winning Nobel Laureate rock stars.

Then the bubble burst, and the same answer to the same question provoked looks of pity and barely concealed disgust. I remember meeting a high-rolling entrepreneur in the early 2000s who asked what I did. I should have told him I hung around playgrounds, stealing children’s lunch money. He would have had more respect for that answer.

I hated the bubble. I hated it when Vanity Fair or New York Magazine treated web agency founders like celebrities. I hated that mainstream media and the society it informs either ignored the web or mistook it for a high-stakes electronic version of the fashion industry.

When the bubble burst, these same geniuses decided the web was of no interest at all. Funny, to me it was more interesting than ever. To me it was people and organizations publishing content that might not otherwise have seen light. It was small businesses with realistic goals delivering value and growing. It was traditional publishers finding their way into a new digital medium, helped by folks like you and me. It was new ways of talking and sharing and loving and selling and healing and being. Hardly dull.

Eventually the uninformed stopped seeing a wasteland and started seeing bloggers, by which they meant only those bloggers who wrote about politics, most often from the extreme left or right. The web was “back” even though it had never left. (Of course, the fifth time you hear Wolf Blitzer say “blogger” or ask, “what do the bloggers have to tell us about these still-unfolding events?” the joke is stale and you wish those who don’t get the web would go back to ignoring it.)

But nothing, not even the rants of political bloggers, was as exciting as the scent of money. As the first properly valued “Web 2.0” properties began to find buyers, a frenzy like the old one popped hideously back to life. Yahoo spent how much? Google bought what? Here was real blood in the water.

But how to persuade the other sharks in the tank that this blood feast was different from the previous boom-and-bust? Easy: Dismiss everything that came before as “Web 1.0.”