Re: FN-FORUM: Opinions on W3C validator

date posted 24th September 2007 12:10

On 24 Sep 2007, at 12:23 pm, [EMAIL REMOVED] wrote:

> Poor project management also play a large part. Most of the bigger
> w3c
> offenders have a team of developers who work on seperate parts of
> the site
> (sound familiar?). It should then be the managers job to ensure
> that they
> peices fit together and work as a whole. Generally this doesn't
> happen.
>
> I would never look at a corperate website and think "that's the way it
> should be done".

Absolutely - the number of times I've heard variations on "well, I
know it's not right, but it's done now. We'll sort it out in Phase 2".

CMS designs often don't help, as others have observed. I'm currently
working with a market-leading CMS that does not - without a lot of
tweaking - produce anything like standards-compliance.

Corporate customers often suffer from two issues, too.

One is the "internal expert" - often a semi-technical "lead user" who
insists on having it done their way, even when their ill-informed
design decisions are going to store up problems for themselves
further down the track.

The other is the (often understandable) budgetary argument: big CMS
systems can cost huge amounts for just the licence, and it is not
unknown for pre-sales folks to argue that the CMS can be used "out of
the box". Sure it can, if you want a 1997 quality website. Such
customers are often peeved to discover that to get something fit for
the noughties they will have to pay more for proper design and
implementation, and not surprisingly they don't want to spend a huge
amount on top of what they already paid.



Ian.
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Ian Piper
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