Markup and your clients
Today I came across two examples of what happens when you put a great, valid site in the hands of a dumb client. I was surfing the portfolio of Winnie Wing Sai Ho and came across the following two sites: Bridges of the Future Canada and STS Group Tours. I came close to bookmarking both for Liquid Designs, but after a quick view source I came across crappy capitalized markup, font tags, and other markup mistakes. I'm sure no amount of precaution could have been enough on the designer's part.
There's a lot of dangers when any moron mucks with markup. It can endanger the semantics of the document, kill validation, and bloat the site with extraneous tags. And if XHTML is served correctly as XML, anything that breaks validation will actually break the site. These dangers have lead me to two conclusions:
Someone needs to tell people that they should not be allowed to touch web pages if they don't know what they are doing. The web is not a toy, and it's not as simple as people think. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think they know what they are doing and don't, but I would much prefer if they just admitted they have no idea what they are doing and back off. Leave the professional work to the professionals.
Since item 1 is obviously going to be ignored, argued against, and so on, let me say that if you are going to put a website in the hands of a client, you have to give them something a little more bulletproof. If the client has a dedicated web operator who actually knows what they are doing, then there's nothing to worry about, but for the other 99.9% of clients, you have to put some kind of human-friendly web text generator in their hands. Something like Textile or Markdown. The editors make it easy to generate web content while ensuring that there are no errors or invalid markup thrown in. And if you are giving your client a CMS driven site, it's easy to integrate something like Textile or Markdown with the publishing interface. I'm using Markdown right now.
As more and more sites become CMS driven, it only makes sense that clients use web text editors. They are free, easy to integrate, and just about bulletproof. What are your experiences with this? Have you had any success stories setting up your clients with a text generator?
Hi Christian! I found your site from my referral log. Thanks for mentioning my site in your blog
I agree with you whole-heartedly when you say leave the professional work to the professionals. It is very frustrating when you see your beatifully designed sites with valid markup get mucked up with font tags, flashing marquee in neon green, etc. Unfortunately that's what happens daily in the company that I work for. Our boss, who is an elite php programmer, developed the CMS and it has been our main selling point since the beginning of time… well at least long before I was hired. The commercial WYSIWYG editor that was integrated in the CMS outputs invalid code. I have suggested many times that we should use an editor that outputs valid code, such as Fckeditor. But the job always gets put in the back burner since we are always too busy working on clients' sites.
In a commercial team setting, it is more difficult than you think to keep sites valid. Most of our 600 or so clients are technically challenged. Tools like Textile and Markdown are still too hard for them. They love our CMS because it has a MS Word like interface which they are familiar with. Changing any feature in the CMS would mean that we need to re-train several hundreds clients. So we need to proceed with caution.
Another problem is that existing staff is not experienced with CSS and XHTML. Very often, the designer of a site is not necessarily the one who maintains it. Since our skills in CSS and XHTML differ, it is hard to maintain completely valid markup.
But on the bright side, we are making progress. I have successfully converted 2 of my co-workers to CSS users and they are on their way to CSS goodness. My boss also starts to realize the benefits of valid markup and has already made some changes to our CMS to make it more valid code friendly. It is still far from bulletproof, but I believe that we have a good start already.
Wow, thanks for commenting! You've taught me a lot just by sharing your experience. Keep fighting the good fight!
Worst experience was when a client "recoded" a massive HTML table (which I had coded as an accesible XHTML table using CSS for text,layout and colors) in Microsoft Frontpage! What would have taken seconds (changing a few colors in the CSS file) now took me the better part of an afternoon because I basically had to redo the whole table.
For now the best solution is probably a WYSIWYG editor that produces some degree of accesible code although IMO none of the current stock of editors is up to scratch…
I agree with Winnie, from experience I've noticed that textile and markdown are just to hard for the average user. Even very intelligent people like doctors and lawyers just have an instant brainmelt when they have to add "little codes" to their text
Erwin: Wow, that does sound like a terrible experience. As for editors, I know Wordpress 2.0 has a decent WYSIWYG interface for making entries and pages but I'm sure it still lacks features.