The Circle of Standards A blog about standards, style guidelines, & best practices for the Web.

I was invited to present my Beyond Web Standards talk at J. Boye Philadelphia and, since I get bored with the same old slides, I redid the talk, yet again.

This latest version of the talk covered The Circle of Standards but, as a bonus, I also added on my notes about creating a style guide.

You can download the slides here. If you’d be interested in a podcast of the talk, please leave a comment!

With a flurry of new browsers hitting users’ computers and mobile devices this year, everyone involved with the Web has had to scramble to ensure that their sites are compatible with the latest and greatest. This has left many Web professionals and business teams wondering, “What browsers should my site support?” Kimberly Blessing helps you answer that question.

Read my article at Peachpit and let me know what you think! And stay tuned for my next article on optimization…

I wrote the following on April 30, 2007 for the standards team I managed at PayPal. It’s a good reminder to any evangelist: stay focused on results, don’t let yourself get bogged down in the politics of the organization, and don’t try to do everything on your own!

We are a SOLUTIONS team –
     not the whining team
     not the complaining team
     not the commiserating team
     not the finger-pointing team

ALWAYS

1. focus on the problem
2. determine what we can solve
3. define what’s for others to solve
4. involve others to help
5. facilitate communications

Whether you’re advocating for Web standards, design patterns, social media, or any other cause or group of people, certain basic principles apply. I think these two resources should be considered mandatory reading for evangelists of all sorts:

• The Developer Evangelist Handbook by Chris Heilmann explains what a developer evangelist does (definition could apply to evangelists in other technical arenas) and provides instruction and recommendations how to best fulfill this role.
• For when times are tough, also read 5 Tips for Stranded Evangelists. The recommendations here will help you work your way out of difficult scenarios when it seems that you’re alone or everyone is against you.

Read any other good evangelism resources lately? Mention them here!

Since the practice of setting and managing standards is as much a management concern as it is a technical concern, I spend time reading a number of business blogs. The HBR Voices blog is full of important management insights.

A recent blog post, How Are You Defying “Best Practice”?, was particularly insightful. Although the article was referring to business and management best practices, it just as easily could have been about design and code best practices.

The only difference is that, while the business world has well-documented and well-established best practices (most commonly taught in MBA programs worldwide), the Web design and development world doesn’t yet have that common set of agreed-upon best practices. What one designer or developer considers a best practice may be contrary to what another one believes.

This leads me to the question of how do you define what is an industry best practice? And, how do you defy those best practices, if at all?

On Saturday, July 18, I gave a talk as part of the CSS Summit on CSS & Troubleshooting IE6. Many designers and developers are passionately anti-IE6, while I’m one of those folks who has a soft spot for the browser. So I laid out the case for continuing support for the browser and gave some tips on how best to do that. Most importantly, I tried to reinforce the idea of planning for and managing browser support, especially the phasing out of specific browsers. After all, if you don’t have a plan, you don’t know where you’re going.

You can download the presentation slides as well as read and comment on the use of IE6 hacks over at my personal site.

I’m often asked how one can convince their employer to adopt Web standards, and unfortunately there isn’t a short or simple answer. That, in part, is why I created the Circle of Standards (both the process and the Web site). I also give presentations on this very topic, including one I’ll be doing today at the online <head> global web conference.

My slides are available for download and if there are questions that don’t get addressed sufficiently in the session, you can post them here.

More tutorial than strict style guide, the New York Public Library Online Style Guide contains information on XHTML and CSS for those developing pages that are part of the library system. Although written in 2001 (with the help of Carrie Bickner-Zeldman), all of the information is still relevant today.

NYPL continues to refine their best practices and processes, of course, and you can follow their progress on the NYPL Labs blog.

Started in the “early days of the web (1992)”, Tim BL‘s Style Guide for online hypertext is still a great resource.

Some of my favorite bits:

• “If you are a person responsible for managing the information provided by your organization, you have to balance the advantages of a ‘house style’ with the advantages of giving each group or author free rein. If you end up with decisions in this area, it is as well to write them down (not to mention put them on the web).”
• “Always use heading levels in order, with one heading level 1 at the top of the document, and if necessary several level 2 headings, and then if necessary several level 3 headings under each level 2 heading. If you don’t like the way heading level 2 is formatted, fix it on your client, don’t just skip to heading level 3.”
• “Have fun with style sheets. Also, within a company or a series of publications, use them to establish conventions which tie a given look to documents of a given status.”

Maybe it’s the co-worker who sits next to you, or perhaps it’s your boss. It could be a new client. And, invariably, someone in your family qualifies. That’s right, they’re the not-so-tech-savvy you have to deal with. How do you get them to understand you so that you can communicate and work together effectively?

Web Worker Daily provides 10 tips for working with the computer-illiterate, ranging from the obvious (avoid jargon and be patient) to smart strategies you may not have figured out yet (introduce new technologies gradually, talk results instead of process).

Two things that aren’t mentioned in the article but deserve emphasis:

1. Don’t talk down to the person or treat them like an idiot. First of all, no one deserves being talked down to. Doing so is going to make you look bad and it will make future communications even more difficult. The person you’re talking to could have a Ph.D. in some other field and simply may not have the background or experience to understand you without more explanation or context.
2. Take the time to educate. I had a boss who was very results-oriented. When I was able to demonstrate the ROI of Web Standards in an effective way, he wanted to understand more. Over the course of a few months, I helped him learn some HTML and CSS, introduced him to our publishing tools, and gave him a copy of Zeldman‘s Designing with Web Standards, which we discussed at length. Didn’t my boss turn around and become my biggest supporter and advocate to more senior management? And all it took was my investing in his education. Think of what educating a co-worker or client could do for you — relieve you of that constant headache from one-off questions? Stop you from rolling your eyes after every interaction? Maybe the payoff seems small, but the mutual growth is worth it.