Andy Budd on Usability, Design, and the Death of CSS

SP: When IE8 comes out some time later this year, it will support CSS tables and will be the last of the big browsers to do so. Do you think there is a light at the end of the tunnel that web developers one day won't have to worry about choosing between using libraries or tables for layout? Or will there always be legacy systems that need accommodating?

This is one of the big issues in the web standards world, with the creation of HTML 5. There's a big discussion about the fact that there are a lot of legacy systems out there. There are a lot of systems built two, three, four, five or more years ago, that the site managers just cannot rebuild. And there are CMS systems that are 10 years old that are using old-style markup.

So when looking at developing the HTML 5 spec, the working group wanted to put the font tag back in. Their argument is, "Well, there are so many people already using it, our browsers need to understand what to do with the font tag, so we need to bake it into the spec." My problem with baking it into the spec for backwards compatibility issues is that you are legitimizing its use, and by legitimizing its use, you're destroying the whole idea of separation of content and presentation which, no matter how impractical it might be in certain situations, I think is a good paradigm to advocate and aim for.

But on the other hand, I do understand the argument for Microsoft and the meta tag that they're introducing. When you update your browser from IE7 to IE8, if a web site breaks, people aren't going to be blaming the web developer, they're going to blame the browser manufacturer -- even if the browser is doing a proper job, they're the ones who get it in the ear.

Unfortunately when they moved from IE6 to IE 7, IE7 was much better and was much more standards-compliant, and the standards world all thought that move was amazing. But they got lots of negative PR and negative phone calls from their sales guys and from their clients, because that update had actually broken existing sites. So backwards compatibility is a big deal. But I do think the idea of bringing the font tag back is crazy and redundant.

So going back to your question, we're always going to be left with redundant pages and redundant markup. And this is a really big problem that the browser manufacturers are always going to have to face. The browser manufacturers might not be supporting IE4, the operating system manufacturers might not be supporting Windows 95, and for a very long time we're going to be left dealing with markup that is very old. And there is important information in those pages -- there are Tripod pages, and GeoCities pages that are 10 years old that have important information, but don't have a web developer or designer or someone still looking after them, but it is still historical data. And talking about digital preservation, at some stage browsers will not be able to backwards-render.

But on the other hand the whole purpose of web standards, partly, is digital preservation -- if everyone created web sites in the proper fashion, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. Wishful thinking, perhaps.

I honestly think that CSS is basically a dead technology after this next revision. I think that's really sad, because I'm a standards advocate, but that's what I believe. I don't think we'll see a CSS4. I don't think we'll see half of the modules in CSS3 implemented, or even end up in the specification, because CSS3 has been under development for 8 years or something ridiculous, and in 8 years we haven't got a single module complete yet. We've got a few almost finished.

But I do think that in this world where I've got a PS3 at home that performs live texture-mapping rendering in 3D, on the fly, why we can't get a browser that can render rounded corners on a box in 2008. You know, we should all have jet packs here! A rounded corner box or multiple background images shouldn't be rocket science.

I think part of the problem is that there are innate problems with the standards development mechanism, and I think there are innate problems with the browser vendors, and I do think we're going to see other technologies -- sadly, proprietary technologies like Flash and Flex and XAML and XML and MXML and non-native Web technologies -- take over, because we are limited with what we can do with our current technology. The reason we're seeing all of these JavaScript libraries come out is because they're supplementing what the standards and the browsers should be doing. It's kind of a stupid situation to be in, and we've got to lobby the W3C to pull their finger out to get these standards ratified, we've got to lobby the browser vendors to stop arguing among each other over petty little things and implement them, and there needs to be a radical shake-up in the way these things are created.

SP: The Web Standards Awards is a site that you and a bunch of guys put together a while back that regularly showcased good examples of combining function and form in a standards-compliant way. Do you think this site will ever come out of retirement to showcase sites built with a bunch of new technologies?

Wow, you've got a good memory! Yes, it's something that me and Cameron Adams, who I didn't know at the time, and a guy named Johan Edlund from Sweden, who I'd also never met. And it was like an antithesis to the CSS Zen Garden, which was awesome. But the Zen Garden was a bunch of people showcasing their CSS skills by working on a single web site.

It was awesome, and it changed a lot of people's impressions about CSS being a boxy thing to being a beautiful thing. But there weren't any showcases of actual, live, working web sites. It's all very well sending your boss to look at a "hacker's" site, but they want to see examples of well-known companies.

So we gave awards to sites like the PGA Golf Tour, and big companies that bosses would know. And the idea was that people would send their bosses to these sites with the message that this web standards stuff isn't just a niche thing -- it's something that lots of people are doing. And we ran that for about a year and a half, and the idea was that we would post one or two awards a week -- silver awards -- and then at the end of the month we'd nominate one of those as being the best site of that month.

And it worked for a while, but then we felt we'd reached a tipping point where standards had started to become that prevalent that there were loads and loads of really good sites out there, and awarding good design stopped being unusual and started just being commonplace. And secondly, there was this proliferation of sites that were doing a similar thing. There was Style Gala, CSS Vault, CSS Beauty, CSS Mania, CSS whatever ... I stopped keeping up. I literally have in my RSS reader, a list of about 30 gallery sites, and I see new ones all the time!

Frankly, when there were three CSS gallery sites, we were thinking "Well, who needs a fourth?" I've got no idea how these sites manage to survive, but they obviously seem to. They all share the same designs -- it's shown on one site, then it proliferates to all the others, so there's very little that's new that's being shared around.

So I guess we thought that the site had done its job, and unlike a lot of these new sites, which are there to make Google advertising and to build a brand for the people that are running the site, the Web Standards Awards existed because we were really passionate about highlighting good design. Once that was a done deal, there was no real need to carry it on.