As most people who love the web as a developer/designer, I too started my days creating websites in good old HTML. And as most people, I used Microsoft FrontPage at first and then moved on to Adobe (Macromedia then) Dreamweaver and then.. Notepad. My progression from a frame based layout to a more complex layout was quite quick, I must add. The process was simple – the designer created what he called as his "masterpiece" idea. As "people in arms" we HTML-ized the layout and then had to test it out on the "then famous" web browsers – Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera. As the testing went on, we felt like we should have been martians or something. They should be far more advanced and didn't need 'em webpages! J Errors popped up one by one and we had to fix them all before the client saw it on his set of browsers. BG images were a no show on Netscape. DIVs and CSS were a mess.
1994 came along and we had the W3 Standards. Clients sent their specifications, now, with a line added – "Should follow W3 Standards". Now, that was sweet, huh? Between all the work, we now had to learn standards and implement them! The designers held up their red flags saying it was a chore to design according to standards and added the most used line – "Design is about idea and creativity. It doesn't follow any standards". So, what followed was a big battle. What they designed, we had to..yeah.. had to bring in the standards. I have nothing against the standards. Standardization is good. Its just that battles rage long and hard. Luckily for me, I wasn't hurt.. I escaped to what I call the "silver lining" of my life – Flash. Really, my interest in Flash wasn't to have an escape route. I got interested in the interactivity and moved in.
It is 2009 and the battle seems to be still raging on. Out of some 30 web designers I know, about 20 still believe in "creative freedom". Designing web 2.0 websites isn't their daily lollipop and making them understand the whole thing is difficult. The question is – Why should the "design" be different from what they do to make it compliant to standards? Isn't that really the job of the HTML guys? Well, I think both people have a role to play here. Visualization should be open to standards and the HTML guys should follow standards to make sure everything fits and validated. Designs should go far away from use of the "invalids" - Nested tables, Image maps and usability issues. Many designs I see around me still force the usage of these.
In many ways Flash breaks a lot of the rules. You start with a clean slate and then draw up your imagination. I had always wanted to build a circular webpage layout back in the 90s and I did that using Flash! You really don't have to bother about serious browser incompatibility issues and spend lots of time in testing across a lot of variables. Your idea is safe and standards go almost to hell.. until.. a person like me shows up and says – name those layers and write meaningful code (variable names, function names etc.). It is another doggy day and you still have to chase the tail!
