Anyone living in Yorkshire having previously having lived most of their life in the south, say, for example in London, (where I spent most of my career before starting a new business ‘oop north), will have been struck on first arrival by the prevalence of the very “user-friendly” Yorkshire dialect, especially in places like supermarkets, trains, local shops and bars and so on.
And although I speak really rather “proper like”, there is something wonderful about the way even a male train ticket collector will call you ‘luv’ — a world away from the cold, eye-avoiding responses you’ll often get in similar situations in London.
Of course, not everyone in Yorkshire is friendly and not everyone ‘darn sarf’ is icy cold.
Calm down dear…
However, I maintain that it is the dialect itself that conveys a lot of the warmth and, importantly, meaning. A grammatically correct greeting can be meaningless without any colour, intonation, etc. No doubt grammatical purists, defending to the last the sanctity of “correct English grammar”, will be dismayed and poised on high like vultures with their dictionaries ready to swoop upon the unassuming carcass of local dialect.
But for me, “Ey up chuck” is soooooo much warmer and welcoming than “Hello dear, how are you?” (Unless of course you are Michael Winner, who has re-defined the meaning of the word “dear”. At least he manages to impart some humour. But I digress.)
Mind your (web) language
I’ll get to my point, which is about web standards and those little, rather old-fashioned icons some web design companies display on their own sites and those of their clients:-
These familiar icons are provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), who as you will probably know already if you have anything at all to do with web design, are the gurus, geniuses and assorted super-techies who actually define the web standards we are all supposed to adhere to when designing and building our web pages.
Undoubtedly, the W3C provides the single most important and definitive resource for web designers and developers on all things web – as you’d expect. It is a fine resource, a veritable fount of knowledge, the one true oracle, the place where you learn to speak the language of the web with the ‘correct grammar’.
It does seem to make sense, then, to have your site validated by this awesome authority. According to the W3C site, you are allowed to use their validation icons only when your page has been validated, and thereafter to check your page frequently for errors.
Never mind what language, what dialect does your site speak?
However, as a digital freelancer who has been around for some time in the world of web and digital, I know that the standards themselves, rather like our beloved English language, are always evolving into new versions – as they must – in order to reflect new developments in such key areas as CSS, HTML, XHTML, Semantic Web, Scripting and Ajax, Graphics and so on. Oh, and Web 2.
It’s quite overwhelming to think just how many are at play here. A bewilderingly complex “web of web standards” is the result.
Let’s just take HMTL. To use a linguistic analogy rather loosely, there are a number of dialects. HMTL 4.1, for example, sports three different versions – Strict, Transitional and Frameset – so which one are you supposed to use?
WordPress bypasses the issue neatly with its built-in TwentyTen theme, by declaring what is in effect the HMTL 5 DOCTYPE, like this :
<!DOCTYPE html>
You can validate your site with W3C using this declaration, yet as the W3C consortium clearly state, HTML 5 is not a yet a standard! (Try telling that to the vast community of web designers who’ve been espousing the benefits of HTML 5 for what seems like years.)
Customer-friendly? Use a dialect…
Its no accident that call centres have been located in Yorkshire for many years – the friendly accent is legendary and good for business. And we need many dialects for the web also. As long as the site does what it needs to do, on the right platforms, do your users really need to know if the site is “valid” or not?
Web users might be forgiven for thinking that a “Valid CSS” icon means you don’t get a red bar with a list of CSS errors when you click on it…
Having an icon gives in my view a misleading impression. What does the icon really mean? That your site is correct because it has the icon, while others not displaying valid icons are by implication “invalid” and therefore potentially unsafe, unusable – dangerous even? In truth, having a site that validates 100% all the time is extremely rare, and a site without the valid icons does not, in and of itself, bring the site or its users to their knees.
But when you do visit a site sporting a valid icon, and you actually click on it, I have yet to find any example where the site actually validates! That little red bar always appears with at least a small number of errors.
Lost in translation…
With the web being what it is, growing at a ferocious pace all the time, standards are going to have a damned hard time keeping up. The relentless pace of change means that web developers are almost always using so-called cutting-edge techniques in order to extract the maximum visual impact and functional capability, and the optimal user experience from their sites.
Case in point: the W3C site itself… take a look at this page from their style/css section. Halfway down, (on the right hand side next to a pic of the page author Bert Bos – W3C’s very own Style Activity Lead) you’ll find the ‘Valid CSS’ blue icon. Click on it – it produced 283 errors when I did! (13/05/2011).
Or try this site www.bbc.co.uk through the validator – around 33 errors when I tried.
To be fair, the W3C do say that putting the icon on your site is only meant to be an indication of your attempt to produce valid, standards-compliant code. But I do think people could be forgiven for thinking that a logo saying “Valid CSS” would mean you get no errors when clicked on. It just looks silly.
More importantly, it could even lose you customers…
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