I was at the constitionary conference of the Dutch guild of frontend coders today. The guild is an initiative by Peter-Paul Koch to form an authoritative institution on standards based web development.

A lot of meetings and consultations with various institutions and freelancers etc. have taken place and have resulted in a mission statement, guidelines and proposed organizational structure. Information on the guild can be found on PPK’s webpage (in Dutch).

Front End Guild

The idea of the guild is to certify frontenders so clients know they are hiring somebody who knows about webstandards and is able to make standards aware choices for your web project. The guild will have a certificatory exam and candidates who succeed on this exam will receive a ‘standards aware’ certificate.

The fact that such a professional organization is being formed with standards based webdevelopment at its heart, says a lot about the standards movement and the progress that has been made. A lot of companies have been pushing standards for a long time and this is a way of formalizing that push, while at the same time serving as a wake up call for those firms who still haven’t adopted web standards.

On the other sides these kind of certification programs serve for large clients and large contracting firms to help each other out and in the process close off their markets. I have not become a member because I am naturally suspicious of certification and I don’t see any immediate benefits of membership at the moment. Furthermore I don’t think any exam taken by a commission would prove much about my knowledge or add anything of value to it.

Controversy

The guild has not been without its share of controversy. Some web developers in the Netherlands most notably from Q42 have raised questions about the objectivity and independence of the organization. These have been both questions about the place where the discussion should be hosted but also a lot of issues about strategy, mission and focus.

In the discussion on PPK’s server some comments by people were deleted without clear reason or procedure. This lack of transparency and obviously strange practice of censorship created a lot of doubt in people (including myself).
At some point Lon Boonen of Q42 posed a counter candidacy to be chair of the guild.

I visited the conference on webstandards organized prior to the constitutive meeting. Because I arrived a bit later I did not sit in at all of the panels. Here some short reports from the panels I visited and the issues raised.

Clients Panel

This panel with some clients (‘opdrachtgevers’; couldn’t think of a better translation) told about their requirements for websites and how they got aware about the necessity to code sites with standard awareness in mind.

They seemed to be a very clued in group with a lot of knowledge about standards and why to use them. One of the arguments they gave was that separation of content, style and behavior gives them more grip on a project. A lot of problems why standards could not be properly implemented was put on the CMS and editor level.

One of the issues they did raise and which directly relates to the raison d’être of the guild is that they have a hard time finding parties who can guarantee standards compliant code. They expect the guild and its certification to offer an easy way of finding standards aware front enders.

Interesting to hear the perspective of these clients, but these seem to be clued in more than your average client. It would have been interesting to hear more about ways to convert clients who do not yet see the importance of standards.

Code Review and aside on XHTML

Tom Greuter from Info.nl did a short code review on a project they did at Info.nl with a look inside of the templates. You could see that they have a lot of clue at Info.nl and that they produce some very tight templates, CSS and JavaScript. Also interesting to see that jQuery is indeed quite popular both at Info.nl and with the people at the conference.

I do keep being surprised that XTHML 1.0 Strict is heralded here and at pretty much every shop as the new gospel. What happened to using POSH and HTML 4.01 which will work everywhere. Did they simply go out of fashion because they were not new and snappy enough anymore? It’s not like there is no literature on the subject or that XML is at all alive on the web.
You can have a technical discussion on this issue, and you could side with either one considering the technical merits. The actual distribution however suggests that nobody has looked at the technical merits at all but that everybody has simply jumped onto the same bandwagon. If we want a vital and really standards aware frontend community, it would not hurt to incorporate more independent critical thought into it and teach people to make their own informed decisions.

Flash within the guild

To end the afternoon Bobby van der Sluis made the case for why Flash should be taken into the guild as a discipline in front-end coding. He took a very circumspect way of getting there and posited Flash as a plugin technology in the continuous development of the web and in its relation to the other technologies we already have to our disposal. This was a very smart way of putting things but unfortunately it did not really address any of the real issues.

Here is my take on Flash. (This could become an article in its own right.)

Whenever the issues of accessibility and search engine indexability with Flash are raised, there are always some Flash developers who say that it is possible to make accessible websites in Flash. While this may be possible in some distant galaxy, it certainly is nowhere near common practice and as long as that is the case Flash programmers need to be called on their bullshit.
It clearly is not easy enough for your common Flash developer to create an accessible Flash site. This lack of interest and capability within the Flash platform to play nice with others makes me think that there is too much work to be done to clean Flash up before it deserves an equal place in a standards based movement.

Right now Flash is only justified when used for complex visuals, animation and/or media. I have yet to see media poor Flash sites which provide the user with a decent experience. A notable exception for this argument is I’m In Like With You which had some very nice Flash integration in its previous version, and where they are pulling off some truly virtuoso work in the current.

Flash sites do not even adhere to the most basic tenets of usability. Usability dictates that people spend more time on other sites than they do on your site. Therefore your site should look and act similar to other sites.
This does not stop common Flash developers from re-inventing user interface, interaction and controls time and time again. In almost all cases they reinvent all of these paradigms very very poorly, rendering a grave disservice to their users. Every button in every Flash site is different (because it is skinned) but a button may seem like an easy control to implement, it definitely is not.
Add to this the impossibility of altering text sizes (which always seem to be too small) or to apply user style sheets for other special needs and you have a usability disaster.

Finally Flash is not a part of the Open Web. Web standards are open technology to promote an inclusive and open web on which everybody can participate. Flash is a closed proprietary technology which locks in both authors and consumers to a single vendor. For only this reason alone Flash should be avoided like the plague and handled with extreme care in the rare circumstances where the benefits outweigh the multitude of cons.

Constitutive Meeting

After the conference everybody went somewhere to get some dinner and prepare for the final constitutive meeting. I could not attend this meeting, but we should have blog posts summarizing the events of the night and the outcome of the elections some time soon.

Update: PPK himself has a post on the meeting and it seems that the differences have been solved amicably and the guild is off to a good start.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 14:58 and is filed under Amsterdam, conference, event, event, webstandards.