[MACCAWS] Re: the Lycos EU move to valid xhtml (fwd)

He sent this a few days ago, but I was camping for the weekend and only
now read it. Good stuff.

--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thor Larholm <[email protected]>
To: "Warden, Matt" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 15:19:49 +0200
Subject: Re: the Lycos EU move to valid xhtml

Hi Matt,

and thank you for writing, I always value the feedback.

I hope I can answer your questions in a satisfactory manner, and that my
input will provide help for your cause.

I have personally pushed aggressively for Lycos Europe to support standards
instead of browsers, with the move to a XHTML/CSS layout being the latest
showcase of this. I personally overlooked and coded the demonstration you
witnessed which will now go live in the different countries as soon as
technically possible during the next months.

I cannot pinpoint any single reason that persuaded our organization to
switch towards standards, instead I will try to highlight some of the
changes and benefits that we have obviously gained by it.

First and foremost, supporting standards is saving us big money and will
definitely become an increasing monetary factor. The deviations in the
different implementations are simply that much smaller and less alternating
than anything we have had to support so far, which means that we can focus
on providing interesting content instead of wasting time on supporting odd
quirks in deprecated browsers. From a business perspective, standards equal
cost savings.

Structuring our documents with XHTML also enabled us to easily integrate the
layout with our different content management systems, all of which are based
on XML. We can now easily mix the data into the structure through XML/XSLT
on the server, avoiding any dependencies between data and structure that
used to exist.

XHTML and CSS has really enabled us to separate the various parts from each
other. Our designers will now be able to make portalwide layout changes from
a centralized location without having to consult our programmers who no
longer have to act as intermediate designers. Our programmers can focus on
their database lookups instead of how their output affects the layout.
Separating data, structure and layout not only affect the technical aspects,
it also affects our job descriptions and allow us to specialize in our
various areas. We will definitely get a shorter time-to-market as well as
better educated staff and more optimized workflow.

Standards are definitely a real competitive advantage to us. While our
competitors spend countless hours struggling to support a minority of
deprecated browsers, we can focus on delivering results that matter to the
vast majority.

Our audience can definitely handle a XHTML/CSS layout, considering the
amount of NS4 users that are fast diminishing. Achieving pixelperfect
similar layout across different implementations is not our responsibility,
and we leave parts of the layout free for interpretation by the useragent as
well as the enduser.

We also found it important to follow standards logically instead of
religiously. This means that we focus on getting our templates and
structures to validate, but still acknowledge that tirdparty content and
mediaproduced HTML spewed from adservers may invalidate the live versions of
the portal. The level of XHTML/CSS knowledge varies among the different
countries, and it does not take much to invalidate (aka, french guys with
faulty capslock). Unfortunately this means that the page may not always
validate due to these cosmetic errors despite our best intentions. This is
of course a sad thing, and we are working towards automatically normalizing
output from our CMS through tools such as HTMLTidy. Having live pages that
validate will only be achieved once the tools for automatically normalizing
content has matured, and we have to acertain that this normalization does
not break the content.

As you have already seen, the templates we work from do validate rigoriously
and we are quite happy about that fact.

I ended up writing a bit more than originally planned, but I still feel that
I probably left out a detail or two. If you have any remaining questions
feel free to ask :)

Regards
Thor Larholm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Warden, Matt" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 6:51 AM
Subject: the Lycos EU move to valid xhtml


>
> Hello, Mr. Larholm.
>
> I was told you might be able to help me out with a question.
>
> I'm part of maccaws.org (MACCAWS = Making A Commercial Case for Adopting
> Web Standards). I heard that Lycos Europe has made the decision to use
> XHTML for markup and CSS for layout.
>
> Our organization is working on developing an argument for commercial
> organizations to adopt standards - why it's in their best interests.
>
> If you have the time, I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on why you
> guys chose to go this route (because, the argument obviously worked), from
> a business perspective. Was it solely because your audience could handle
> it? Did it look like it would save you money in the long run? Does your
> site have a need to be easily skinned? etc.
>
> We are trying to research and collect all reasons to code to a standard
> rather than a collection of browsers. I think the answers to why you chose
> to make such a move will prove invaluable to our efforts. Any help you can
> provide in this area would be most helpful.
>
> As an aside, do you think Lycos Europe would be interested in our
> efforts? I don't really mean that we're looking for financial support, but
> having logos from commercial organizations who have given us "moral
> support" could go a long way in any bandwagon marketing campaign we might
> employ.
>
> Thanks for any help you may provide.
>
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Matt Warden
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> mattwarden
> mattwarden.com
>
>
>
>
>