2/07/2016

Standards, when does a Designer stick to them or ignore them?

Pop quiz, You go to McDonald's and order up a Big Mac, what do you expect to find in the box alongside your fries and drink? I'm guessing you answer was something along the lines of the old Ad jingle

"Two all beef patties, special sauce, Lettus, cheese, pickles, onions on a seseme seed bun"

This has come to be expected because McDonald's has a standard of what the Big Mac is, and the end consumer has come to expect that standard when they order.

Web Designers, like McDonald's with their Big Mac, also have standards We are supposed to use when preparing Our products for the Customers. Those Standards are known as programming languages and is why, no matter the Website, using the code 

<img src="file.ext" alt="description" hight="pixels" width="pixels"> 

will result in your brower displaying a specific image exactly how it was told to display it on any device.

Any device and Standards is where the comparison to McDonald's much beloved hamburger starts to fall apart in Web Design though. You see, Web Design does indeed have a organization that is tasked to overseeing Web Standards.  That organization is the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C for short.

The W3C oversees standards for Web Design, in all forms from Websites to the Web of Devices ( which is commonly being referred to as the Internet of things, or IoT), and they do their job well except for one problem. 

Thanks to the efforts of companies like Google and Microsoft's Bing, coupled with the ever progressing changes to Mobile Computing, the Standards are not progressing at the same speed as technology does.

This, actually creates a very unique problem for Designers as on the one hand, practices of Good Design should dictate that Our final products are meeting the code requirements of these W3C overseen standards while at the same time result in lower rankings on search engines or even incompabable display of content on different browers.

In other words think of dealing with Web Standards and evolving technology like this

Imagine you have walked into McDonald's, ordered that Big Mac, got to your table and upon opening the box found a Whopper.

No comments:

Post a Comment