Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

7nights.com
There is so much talk about Web standards and all that goes along with it that I feel like some people are not getting it and placing way to much value on things like validation, tableless design and semantics.

I totally agree. 

Here’s an interesting exercise.  Choose any community that is web-development related, but not strictly “implementation-oriented”.  The Churchsite - Chat Yahoo Group is a good example.  It’s a community for those folks who are charged with maintaining a church website - and the discussion topics vary greatly from down-in-the-dirt technical implementation issues to content issues (I don’t mean to pick on this list, it’s just the first one that came to mind).

Develop two questions to post to the group.  The first one should ask about the advantages of tables vs. going tableless.  The second question should ask something more audience-focused, like What Should a Church Website Be?

Post one question, wait till the thread dies down, the post the other.  Here’s what I can virtually gaurantee will happen.  The “tables vs. tableless” post will (if it hasn’t been discussed lately) generate a TON of responses.  Passionate, articulate, well-reasoned responses from people who really know what they’re talking about. 

And the other question?  You might get a couple, maybe a few responses.  Maybe one or two passionate or well-reasoned ones, but more than likely they’ll be mostly “here’s what I think” types, based on subjective experience or antecdotal evidence.

Overall, we’ve collectively got the technical side of the web pretty nailed.  Yes, there are challenges and difficulties, but most times there are known workarounds and solutions.

Where the web really shows it’s immaturity is when you try to figure out the best use, the best messaging, the very root of what this thing should “be”.  And that’s more important than standards.

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Dave J. on September 23, 2003

   And in church you are going to get more arguments about the music played than the sermons!

2. Michael Boyink (Author) on September 23, 2003

   Or worse yet, what instruments are used to play the music…;)

3. Mean Dean on September 24, 2003

   I generally go tableless because it’s less code, and I can. And it’s usable.

   That said, there are times I use tables because in the context of the project, it is less code and equally usable.

   Context, context, context.

   What really irks me, esp. on Churchsite Chat are the “validation” nazi’s who trump every argument with “your site doesn’t validate” ... when it may be something as simple as an ampersand used as part of the URI for the BibleGateway.

   Good article ... I’ll probably steal the link in an upcoming post.

4. Michael Boyink (Author) on September 24, 2003

   LOL….and Dean confirms my point…;)  It’s so easy to get worked up over implementation issues…tables..no tables..code..validation… Important?  Yes.  Worthy of the amount of attention vs. purpose, content, and goals?

5. Yex on September 26, 2003

   Good stuff.  I can really appreciate this point, as it really hits home with me.  I am part of a project to re-design our church web site, and we’ve been working on it for several months now (the better part of 2003 to be more accurate), and we’ve recently made a change in our strategy with our layout and design.

   At first, we were (at least I was anyway) pretty set on using as pure of a CSS layout and design as possible.  Then we had a designer come in and came up with a good color-scheme and some graphics/layout ideas for us, and some of the ideas that he was having just wasn’t working out with the layout (CSS) that we were trying so hard to make work.  In the end, we recently decided that more than likely 99% of our users (if not more than that) wouldn’t really care at all *how* our design was implemented, as in whether or not it was pure CSS or used tables or whatever.  They only care about the content.  So we’ve decided to go with a more hybrid approach, using a large table as the overall framework for the layout, and CSS to implement the look and positioning of objects within the table (the content).  The prototype that we have for that now works SO much better than we had before.

   Yes, I will grant the purists out there that it has taken a bit more code to implement.  So what.  It’s achieving what we need for our project, and give us a LOT more flexibility and control over the placement of objects.  It’s working VERY well for us.  And the content is already there…maybe even more than we can handle at the moment, heh.

   Thanks for making the point.  It needed to be said.

6. John on September 26, 2003

   It’s funny that the discussions on tableless design would get so much more attention that the meatier question of what a church website should be. One of the points of going CSS is to put a better focus on the content. Content should always be considered before you decide what a site will look like—it should actually inform your decision on what the site will look like as well as how you implement it.

Back to Article