Comments on: Building for the future

By: Justin Viger

Justin Viger — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:07:13 +0000

I am with Paul on this one. We should be "evolving over time", just like he did with the headscape and boagworld websites.

By: Paul Boag

Paul Boag — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:51:01 +0000

I am not suggesting that the markup wouldn't need to change if you did a redesign. What I am saying is that we shouldn't be redesigning. We should be evolving over time and standards make this a hell of a lot easier.

By: Leesy

Leesy — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:09:25 +0000

Robot eyes will be here soon. Wait and see. I’m with Stuart – I can’t see a redesign ever being done without markup being changed. After all, wouldn’t that be more of a reshuffle than a redesign?
Another thing that using standards certainly does though is to ensure that the website is in a state where anyone can redesign it. If you move on from your company etc. the next person who gets to do the redesign at least gets a good starting point. No having to spend several days just trying to trace where they have put everything.

By: Rob

Rob — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 18:24:54 +0000

Building with web standards is the basis of future thinking, and it is the best method to avoid major redesigns. Being forever stuck in redesign though, should be a normal consideration when building a site. We all like to have a new computer time to time. When I get new clients the first question I ask them is what EXACTLY is your site for? Usually the answer is vague at best. I then quickly inform them that building a site is a financial investment, and they will need to have good rea$oning. It makes it a bit easier to design then too. Too often people or management take the idea of having a site for granted, and may have forgotten the financial gain or savings they get by having a website.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:09:12 +0000

Love the Trigger analogy.

By: Stuart Langridge

Stuart Langridge — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:42:10 +0000

Hrm. What I was driving at was that, to take an example, the beautiful promise of actually “separating presentation from content” was that all future re-designs would involve merely changing the CSS; your markup, because it was done once properly and semantically, would never need to change again. In my experience, that’s rubbish; I’ve never, not once, not ever, been able to deliver a re-designed site without touching the markup. (Maybe I’m unusual in this, but I don’t think I am.)
In the same way, separating the behaviour layer from the content offers the same promise; we’ll overlay some unobtrusive scripting over that beautiful semantically-designed HTML and to change the behaviour merely change the scripting. Again, it hasn’t happened, and critically (unlike CSS) the behaviours we’re building now are fundamentally different from those we were building three years ago. What will they be like in three years time? In five? In ten? The web of 1998 was a fundamentally different place than it is today; we understand it a lot better, for a start. I have no reason to suppose that we won’t have undergone similarly radical shifts in our understanding (and thus be in a position to undergo similarly radical shifts in how we build the web) in 2018. It’s not that the technology changes (although it does), but that our depth of understanding does. That’s why it’ll be different; we’ll look back on our efforts of today and chuckle ruefully at how childish and ill-informed they seem by comparison.
I really don’t think it’ll be Silverlight, though :-)