Earlier I was reading an article Where Our Standards Went Wrong at A List Apart about the value of standards based web development. You know, about having a strong bias towards valid xhtml and css and what the business case for that bias would be.

None of this changes the here and now. To be honest, the pragmatists are right: that for the most part, validation and commercial web design are polar opposites. But the tools are evolving to the point where we can begin moving beyond validation as a roadblock, and CMSes like WordPress and Slashcode are dedicated to producing standards-compliant code; visual editors such as Dreamweaver and (more recently) Microsoft Expression Web almost stubbornly refuse to produce invalid markup. So where do we go from here?

Microsoft Design Culture

Now I’m thinking Hey! This is a nice impartial site with great design and wonderful advice and they have just mentioned Dreamweaver and a Microsoft product in the same breath. So I just had to click it and I see a site that’s so subtle and attractive the first thing I did was double-check I was in fact at microsoft.com. The root for the area is http://microsoft.com/design and I checked: the source is totally valid xhtml 1.1 and the css is pretty darn good also. And this is coming from an aspx driven site!

So. Yeah! I think Microsoft got it. Standards based compatibility. Beauty of design. Pure layout-free html. Very nice.

There are some really interesting tricks in there too. Like check out the Microsoft Expression page - those boxes on the bottom are each a single <a> tag that contains two <span> and one <img>. And that’s so cool because the entire block acts a nice simple link - the entire square is clickable and with the href shows up in the status bar when you point at it. The way the box changes when you’re pointing at it is because all of the style on the classes changes. Like there’s an “a:hover .product-status” rule that underlines and brightens one of the spans when you point anywhere at the entire <a> square.

So I’m going to download the Expression thing and give it a try. I’ll blog about it afterwards.