On Web Standards

Actually, I’d go so far as to say the designers of all three sites are showing remarkable competence because they’ve delivered such a great experience.

Joe Clark can suck the tar off my sandals for all I care. The day he builds something as insanely cool as Flickr, as massively useful as Google Maps, or as incredibly convenient as Amazon then I’ll give a rats ass what he has to say. While I wait for that to happen, I’ll happily ignore his bitching and get on building Web applications.

Ok, so that’s the other extreme point of view…

“Don’t make standards an absolute necessity if they’re going to hold you back from coming up with something like Gmail that completely changes the way we use the Web.”

And for gods sake, don’t make a ramp a necessity if it’ll hold back showing how wonderful and useful your buildings staircase is.

If you have to talk about “putting technology before humans.”at least have the courtesy to add “some humans” as “some” need these standards.

Dave, that’s like saying that everything needs to be accessible to everybody all the time.

Think about how many tools you enjoy that aren’t accessible to everybody.

Ever ridden a bicycle?

We should try to make things accessible!, but my major argument was that we shouldn’t dismiss the creators of those things as incompetent and unprofessional because their code doesn’t validate. They are obviously adding tremendous value to some audience.

All designers end up developing for a subset of the world…it’s kind of like getting angry at them for not providing their interface in every single language known to man. Are English-speaking bloggers incompetent because their sites are not mirrored in Russian?

So again, we should try to make things accessible, but being draconian about validation doesn’t really help *anybody*.

That said, any time an audience is left out of a design is an opportunity for others…

Josh, the fact is that Clark thrives on making bold, broad, and above all controversial statements. Yes, making applications more accessible to those with disabilities is important. It is a worthy goal because all human interaction is enriched by being inclusive.

However, it’s a mistake to place yourself so far out at the end of the spectrum that you make idiotic remarks like Clark does. He actually does more to harm to the effort to make applications accessible by being so strident. Developers like me, who are interested in including everyone in their application designs, have a tendency to tune out anyone who calls us “incompetent”.

As anyone who’s built any sort of application knows, whether Web-based or not, you always have a longer list of features and requirements than you can possibly deliver on even if your team were twice as large and you had twice the time. (If you don’t you haven’t done enough research.) Features always get cut.

The goal is to make as big an impact on as large a fraction of your potential user community as you possibly can. And whether Clark likes it or not, accessibility doesn’t impact the majority of people. Therefore, it almost always gets cut.

That doesn’t mean that applications like Google Mail and Amazon can’t possibly be made accessible, just that they haven’t yet. Calling their developers incompetent isn’t going to hasten the day these applications become accessible. It’ll just breed resentment.

You selected three dissimilar cases. Flickr is much closer to standards compliance than the other two and takes progressive enhancement seriously. (My friend using Windows 98 without Flash can still use Flickr and does.) There are lots of slots for text equivalents. Sorting and many other features work well. I have, on many occasions, looked at Flickr pages in Lynx and been reasonably satisfied.
The Google search page is so simple it defies logic why they aren’t using better code.
The Amazon case is a flat-out disaster from any rational coding standpoint.
Finally, I don’t make any kind of living through my bold pronouncements. I must be honest, however, and it often costs me. Nonetheless, my Failed Redesigns posting considered not merely validation but *semantics*, and, behind the scenes, many Failed Redesign candidates were given a pass and were not entered because their invalid code was mildly so and had good semantics. I’m sure Bokardo will make the time to reread the postings and recognize that I was not making a complaint based on a single criterion.

I remember Amazon being close to unusable in Firefox at one stage. Tiny input fields that showed only a vertical fraction of the text inside. That’s a usability problem, and Amzon had to invest more time to correct it.
The Target.com website, subject to a disability discrimination accessibility suit, is based on the Amazon framework, with the markup. Valid markup would have prevented the suit - since alt attributes on images are mandatory.
Yes, Amazon are a good source for buying books, but when their website goes wrong, it goes horribly wrong. Luckily they can afford the cost of continuous patching.