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Web Standards save money.

19 July, 02:20 pm

A little while ago on A List Apart, PPK wrote an article asking how to convince middle sized web development companies that web standards are a good thing. The answer is of course MONEY! and money is of course (especially with developers) time.

The article reminded me of something that I realised recently: unobtrusive JavaScript saves time. When we were developing the South Thames College website we needed an accessible image gallery. We’ve often used Flash/XML based galleries before, but we didn’t need the power (and complication) of Flash so a JavaScript powered solution seemed like the best solution.

The solution went something like this:

  1. Dump all the gallery’s content on the page using raw HTML.
  2. Hide the bits you don’t want to show and by manipulating the (DOM)Document Object Model with JavaScript.
  3. Use JavaScript to add behaviours to show the removed information (changing the main image) when a thumbnail is clicked.

Here is an example of the gallery in action showing examples of student’s work.

This solution saved time/money in at least three ways:

  1. All the server side developer had to do was put the content into an HTML list (eliciting responses along the lines of “is that it?” from the developers). This should be about 5 minutes of (expensive) server-side development at the most.
  2. All the design and implementation of the gallery was in my control, saving the need for complicated communications explaining how it should work to an already busy developer.
  3. We now have a solid, tested, accessible and flexible gallery script that we can re-use on future sites.

There are a million other reasons for developing sites with web standards (the ‘The Business case for Web Standards’ Wiki.) is a good place to start) but this was a rather nice side effect of doing things the right way.

Further reading

If you’re interested in unobtrusive JavaScript be sure to check out DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. I highly recommend it to anyone who writes HTML.

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