Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

No matter how hard we try, there will always be web sites that refuse to validate, don’t want to play ball where it comes to accessibility and laugh in the face of table-free CSS layouts – and mostly these sites are the type that are generated dynamically (be that a CMS solution, an e-commerce site or a user-driven forum). Today I spotted an email which I felt compelled to follow up on though – it was regarding an e-commerce shopping cart service that claimed it could achieve AAA Bobby compliance, validate as XHTML Transitional and would generate pages that are table-free (unless there is real tabular data). “Ahh, heard that one before,” I thought, and picked up the phone to speak to ‘one of their tech guys’ to grill him a bit more. What I heard from the other end of the line, though, was very encouraging, so I’ll paraphrase here:

“Inspired by CSS Zen garden … cannot change underlying XHTML but we provide hooks for CSS manpulation, like the zen garden … not enforcing table-based designs because we appreciate that not all developers understand how to do this … the Doug Bowman sliding doors method [used in one template] … using the @import statement to split styles between basic and advanced … the Zeldman method … AAA compliant except for pages with forms because of the deault placeholder text …”

This is not the kind of ‘marketese’ I’m used to hearing, and for a change it felt goooood. The site/service in question is called Karova, and will be premiered at the Techshare 2003 conference in Birmingham, UK, and I’ll be watching this one with interest.

Post a Reply

Comments are closed.