Interview - Rachel Andrew, Dreamweaver Task Force

Rachel Andrew runs her own Web solutions company. edgeofmyseat.com, the company Website, is also home to various Web standards articles and Dreamweaver extensions.

Rachel preaches practical standards to those who wouldn’t normally stop to consider the issues involved. She is a member of the Dreamweaver Task Force for the Web Standards project's www.webstandards.org, and the co-author of 2 books.

Recently I spoke to her about standards, working with Macromedia, Dreamweaver, and a lot more...

Rachel, do you think standards are becoming more accepted in the wider web community?

Definitely. A year ago I was inciting flame wars on mailing lists simply by saying that it might be a good idea to validate a page that is being troublesome. That doesn’t happen any more. There is more understanding out there of what Web standards are, and why they’re important, and there’s a growing interest in working with CSS for layout, using XHTML as opposed to HTML, ensuring that pages are accessible, and so on.

If people aren’t willing to move with the times, they’re going to get left behind – and newcomers to the industry, who aren’t stuck working the way we had to work four or five years ago, are going to find that they have a real advantage over these people.

Why did you think it was the right time to write a book for complete beginners that covers standards?

A complete newcomer to this industry would be crazy to learn anything else. Web standards are really coming into the spotlight, not just because they’re important in their own right, but because using mark-up that validates has implications on a whole host of other issues. There’s accessibility, for one: a standards compliant document has a far higher chance of being parsed correctly by devices other than a Web browser. If you’re starting right at the beginning, you might as well start out with a solid understanding of the languages that are used on the Web, and how to use them in the correct way.

This is one area in which a newcomer can really gain an advantage, as they don’t have to “unlearn” old techniques that we once used to cope with two main browsers and their associated proprietary tags and implementations.

How was it working with Macromedia as part of their Dreamweaver Task Force? Why does MX still default to <b> and <i> rather than <strong> and <em>?

I think the best thing about the run-up to the launch of Dreamweaver MX was how much was changed. I was impressed by the amount of work Macromedia was prepared to put in, to ensure that Dreamweaver MX did support Web standards –- including the new support for XHTML, the validator, and the new CSS Property Inspector.

At the end of the day, what we have with Dreamweaver MX is a visual development environment that can, out of the box, produce pages that validate to an HTML or XHTML DOCTYPE. That’s a huge improvement over Dreamweaver 4, and means that even those designers who know or care very little about standards can produce sites that come far closer to being standards compliant than they were before. The fact that there are things like the validator included also raises awareness. If someone who doesn’t know about standards runs a page through the validator and it returns some errors, they may well investigate what they need to do to fix them -- and become more knowledgeable in the process.

For those developers who do understand the issues and were very frustrated by earlier versions of Dreamweaver, which added elements that made their documents invalid, Dreamweaver MX is a big leap forward. Of course, there’s no substitute for knowledge and the ability to write mark-up by hand. But if you like to work in a visual way, Dreamweaver MX is a tool that lets you work visually and create clean, compliant mark-up.

There are things that would make it even better and, as you point out, some things still hark back to an older way of doing things (use of <strong> and <em> tags, and the Property Inspector defaulting to font tags, being two of those). However, it’s quite likely that many users of Dreamweaver would have no idea what <strong> meant, and are still working on sites that use font tags as opposed to CSS. If Dreamweaver appeared to have dropped support for the way these work, then that segment of the Dreamweaver audience would feel rather unhappy towards Macromedia!

I see Dreamweaver MX as a “stepping stone” to a product that does default to a truly standards-compliant way of working. Perhaps the next version will be that product, and the defaults will be what is considered best practice. By that point, users will hopefully have found these newer ways of working -– either through the Dreamweaver interface, or just because awareness is growing -- and it won’t be such a shock to them!

The fact that developers of Web authoring tools, and browser manufacturers are now quoting standards compliance as a top feature of their products really demonstrates how important this issue is becoming.