Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation on the topic of Web professional education. In previous podcast we?’ve outlined a host of challenges facing those seeking education and training in the Web space including those that teach Web topics a2z. For today?’s podcast, I?’d like to shift gears a bit and focus on what this professional association has in mind for supporting these important issues.
For starters, I had the pleasure to be interviewing Chris Mills, developer relationship manager for Opera residing in the UK. Chris along with a number of extremely talented, energetic and passionate Web professionals developed a baseline curriculum for Web standards.
Check out the three minute interview on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.
Today’s podcast is sponsored by the Webmaster Survival Guide. Check out all of the great resources and links on the Webmaster Survival Guide website.
1: Introduction to The Web Standards Curriculum/Table of Contents
Check out the full resources at: Web Standards Curriculum website.
By Chris Mills · 8 Jul, 2008
Published in: curriculum, beginner, Web, standards, course
This is Article 1—the first article in the Web Standards Curriculum.
Next article—The history of the Internet and the web, and the evolution of web standards
Table of contents
Introduction
For a while now, I?’ve had a dream. My work in the last 8 or 9 years has been heavily focused around education, whether I?’ve been commissioning and editing technical books to help people create cool stuff with technology, training new employees at the various companies I?’ve worked for, or editing and writing tutorial articles to help people use Opera?’s software. I am passionate about the Web too, and a big believer in open web standards. I wanted to do my bit to help make the Web a better place, and I think this comes back to education, whether that?’s teaching people how to collaborate and have more respect for one another, or teaching them how to make their web sites work across platforms and devices, and be accessible to people with disabilities. Web standards are key to the latter, so I decided to try putting my time and energy into something that would help increase the adoption of web standards on the Web today and in the future. It has been floating around my head for a while now, but it has finally come to fruition at Opera—many thanks to my wonderful employers for paying me to do this! One of my dreams has finally been realised.
So in this article I introduce to you the product of a lot of hard work over the last several months (by myself and a lot of other people)—the Web Standards Curriculum, a course designed to give anyone a solid grounding in web design/development, no matter who they are—it is completely free to use, accessible, and assumes no previous knowledge. I am mainly aiming this at universities, as I believe the standards of education in web standards to be somewhat lacking at many universities. I?’ve heard tales of students being marked down for using web standards in their coursework, because the marking schemes are so outdated; I?’ve also heard tales of employers despairing because when they interview university graduates for web–related positions, they find out that the graduates really don?’t have a clue about real world web development. If you?’re at a progressive university that does teach web standards in a reasonable fashion, then I tip my hat to you—get in touch!
In this article I?’ll cover the following:
* Why web standards? Here I briefly discuss the advantages of using web standards, why they are not being adopted like they should, and how my course aims to tackle these issues
* How the course is structured. What it says on the tin; this section also talks about how educators should think about presenting the material to use it effectively in courses
* Who should use this course? When I say “anyone”, who do I mean, exactly?
* The table of contents. Skip to this bit if you?’re fed up with my waffle and want to get straight to the learning.
* Acknowledgements
* Contact me
Why web standards?
The main reasons that adopting web standards in your web design/development work is such a good idea are expanded on in article 4, but I?’ll go through them briefly here, to set the scene. Using web standards confers the following benefits:
1. Efficiency of code: As you?’ll learn throughout the course, a lot of best practice web standards usage is all about reusing code—you can separate your HTML content from your stylistic (CSS) and behavioural (JavaScript) information, allowing your file sizes to be kept small, and code to be written only once, and then reused wherever it is needed.
2. Ease of maintenance: This follows closely on from the last point—if you can write HTML only once, and then apply styles and behaviour wherever they are needed using classes and functions, then if you need to change something at a later date, you can just make the change in one place and it have it propagate throughout the entire web site, rather than having to specify that change everywhere that it is needed!
3. Accessibility: The next two points are closely related—one of the big issues on the Web is making web sites accessible to everyone, no matter who they are, regardless of circumstance. This includes making web sites usable by people with disabilities such as blindness/visual impairment and motor impairment (ie, people who have restricted movement, and might not be able to use their hands properly, or at all). By using web standards and best practices, you?’ll be able to make your web sites usable by this significant group of the web audience with no extra effort.
4. Device compatibility: by this, I mean ensuring that your web sites will work not only across different platforms—ie Windows, Mac, Linux—but also alternative browsing devices, which these days can include mobile phones, TVs and games consoles. These devices have limitations such as screen size, processing power, control mechanisms available and more, but the good news is that again, using web standards and best practices, you can pretty much guarantee that your web sites will work on most of these devices. There are more mobile phones in the world than PCs, a lot of which are Internet–capable, so can you or your clients afford to miss out on this market? For more on mobile web development, check out some of the dedicated articles on dev.opera.com.
5. Web crawlers/search engines: By this, we are talking about what is termed search engine optimization—the practice of making your web sites as visible as possible to the so–called web crawlers that trawl the web and index web sites, and therefore giving you better search rankings on sites such as Google. There is a science to this (see SEO articles such as Intelligent site structure for better SEO! and Semantic HTML and Search Engine Optimization) but yet again, just by using web standards you will make your site a lot more visible on Google, Yahoo!, etc., which is good for business.
Even with all these advantages however, most sites on the Web still do not follow web standards, and many web developers working today still use bad, outdated practices. “Why?” You ask. There are a number of reasons for this—people will cite lack of education, company policy, not needing to learn standards because they are getting paid anyway, it?’s too hard to learn, standards support in web browsers…let?’s look at each one of these in more detail, and then look at the counter arguments, to try to get rid of any excuse for not adopting/learning standards.
1. Lack of education: There is an issue here, but this is one of the main reasons this course was created. A lot of universities don?’t teach web standards in their web–related courses, and a lot of curriculums tend to contain outdated practices, and are hard to change due to bureaucracy. Books and training courses tend to be expensive. But wait! Now we?’ve provided a course that?’s free, and are running around universities etc to help make these changes for them, so there?’s really now no excuse here.
2. Company policy: There is no doubt that some companies/institutions still have really old and outdated web sites. They may have policies that force their employees to use outdated browsers, but it is getting better, and now there is a free course available to easily show how to make changes, things should improve further. Upgrading a web site to modern standards encourages companies to upgrade the browsers that they use, as sites will not look as good in outdated browsers (although they should still work in older browsers). Companies should encourage their customers to upgrade as well. There is sound business reasoning as well—sites that use web standards, as explained above, will yield better search engine results and be accessible to people with disabilities and users of alternative devices—can companies afford to ignore this audience?
3. “I don?’t need to learn them!”: I know some developers will sit there and say “but I?’m using outdated practices and still getting paid—so why do I need to bother with this new stuff?” As explained above, it makes your code more efficient, easier to write, and easier to maintain. And it allows you to write modern code that is accessible and usable on alternative devices—isn?’t that exciting? It will also make your skillset more future–proof, and make you capable of earning more. A lot of companies are requesting skills in web standards these days.
4. “It?’s too hard to learn!”: Rubbish. After digesting some of this course, you?’ll realize how easy it is to pick up the basics of using web standards, whether you?’re new to web development/design, or an existing web person upgrading your skillset. It is about as hard as using the old, outdated bad methods, which isn?’t very, and it confers so many advantages over the old ways.
5. Standards support in browsers: Standards support in browsers used to differ greatly, which made getting web sites to work across different browsers a nightmare. But those days are gone—modern browsers all have decent web standards support. Support is still sometimes needed for old browsers that don?’t have such good browser support, but by using modern best practices, you can ensure that users of those browsers will still have a reasonable user experience.
So as you can see, there?’s really not any excuse to not adopt web standards in your web development work. At least if you are coming to this course from the point of view of a beginner, you are starting off on the right foot and learning best practices from the start, rather than having to unlearn bad practices.