Where do you draw the line?

2005.04.17

Developing with web standards is great. We all know the advantages, we have proven it to our clients, and they are convinced. Hell, the occasional IE blooper can turn out to be good too: it makes the job interesting and gives that wonderful sense of achievement when a workaround really works. Or gives us more reason to hate M$, which is not entirely bad either.

However, things start getting ugly when a client comes up with a request that web standards can’t deliver. It could be an intranet solution where the target audience is on ancient browsers, an html email that needs to preserve its appearance intact at all times, or simply a website that has to look as good on IE 5 as on Firefox.

You can try proposing an alternative solution that gets the job done with standards. Most probably this requires compromises to be made by the client’s end. Good for you if they settle for it, but what if they don’t?

This leaves the frustrated designer two difficult options to choose from:

Give up the project
Die-hard web standards freak may not have to think twice before coming to the obvious conclusion: if it can’t be done with standards, it’s not worth doing it.
Do it with tables
This is about meeting the ‘Whore Point’ of Kev’s Undiscussed Parts Of The Design Process.

We all have to draw the line somewhere. Some designers can afford to be more flexible, because standards don’t mean much to them anyway. For the rest of us evangelists, it’s either doing a bit of soul-selling and keeping it hush-hush, or proudly proclaiming our unwavered support for everything WaSP and hoping the next project, if it comes our way, will pay the bills.

At the end, it’s not really a matter of how far you can go and where you draw the line. It’s about where you stand on the issue of web standards, and whether your income can support it. Doesn’t sound fair at all, but design is business, and business was never famous for being fair.

Permanent Link | Filed under: Design, Standards, Thoughts

4 Comments

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  1. OldBoy

    April 18th, 2005 at 8:37 am

    Good point. Agree… but not completely.

    My personal idea is, no conversion is perfectly smooth & it takes time. Same applies to our clients. When the outside world gets more & more educated & concerned about accessibility & usability, things will get smoother. - Those days no building had a entrance for disabled on wheelchairs.

    So for the time being, we have to bear the pain. So still I’d take such projects -to go with tables-, but will try to make it useable & accessible as far as possible. But if there’s some one who doesn’t want to touch tables anymore & blessed with $, he can do two things:

    1) Wait till every possible client is somehow educated on accessibility, so they don’t ask for table things anymore.
    2) Educate them.

    So for the time being, practice I’d follow is, Make accessible sites. If clients wants something else, show him what he’ll loose. If he still wants it, do it & make it accessible as far as I can.

    Let’s keep the web clean - But cleaning is a process :)

  2. Kev

    April 18th, 2005 at 5:04 pm

    It’s been a hard lesson for me to learn but really all you can do is explain your position, outline with advantages, explain the disadvantages of not going that way and trust your client is wide enough to see things your way.

    My latest site saw me arguing with the client that we had to accomodate 800px width users - they wanted to abandon them in favour of more ad space. In the end I got down on my knees and begged (metaphorically speaking!) them not to committ web-busines suicide and they saw reason but thats a very rare victory in these sort of discussions.

  3. Kev

    April 18th, 2005 at 5:04 pm

    “client is wide enough” should of course read: “client is wise enough”.

    Oh dear.

  4. Prabhath

    April 19th, 2005 at 5:04 pm

    Sometimes we are cornered - I feel sorry for the in-house designers who are bullied in to doing things that makes the management feel good, and those who are stuck in design agencies that don’t give a shit about standards.

    For freelancers and the few of us who are at places where web standards are given due respect, it’s a matter of personal preference. As you say Kev, we’ll always know, even though it doesn’t go on the portfolio.