Web Directions

Validation: coming soon to a web site near you

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• February 7, 2008
• Comments currently closed.

Ben Buchanan got in touch a few weeks back, excited to let me know that after a long strug­gle over at News Digital Media, they’d got the Aus IT home page to val­i­date. Other peo­ple over at NDM have writ­ten in the past about the long march between gath­er­ing together a team of enthu­si­as­tic and com­mit­ted stan­dards based devel­op­ers and design­ers, and the real­ity of actu­ally mak­ing web stan­dards adop­tion hap­pen across a mas­sive site main­tained by a large organ­i­sa­tion, so I thought it was worth fol­low­ing up with Ben about how they’d finally reached this milestone.First a bit of back­ground. Ben joined NDM (then News Interactive) in September 2006, start­ing as an “HTML Developer”. He’s now “Lead Frontend Developer (Mastheads)”.

Aus IT only val­i­dates reli­ably on the home­page right now and the third party video player isn’t included (that’s being replaced by the next ver­sion, not fixed; and it’s iso­lated in an iframe). Aus IT is the first NDM news(paper) web­site to val­i­date, although NDM acquired Taste​.com​.au last year which, as far as Ben knows, was the first pro­duc­tion NDM site to validate.

Maxine: You’ve recently reached a bit of a mile­stone, with the val­i­da­tion of the Aus IT Homepage, which, among other things, makes the site eli­gi­ble for the McFarlane Prize. Do you want to talk me through the major issues that have stopped this hap­pen­ing before now?

Ben: The biggest issues were the very old code base (it was a table-​​based site when I joined NDM), the adver­tise­ment code and other invalid third-​​party code like stats track­ing and video play​ers​.To give an exam­ple, the default ad place­ment code we receive intro­duces about 14 val­i­da­tion errors per adver­tise­ment. So the ads alone ensured the site could never val­i­date or be eli­gi­ble for the McFarlane Prize.You can’t just blithely change that code, either. You have to remem­ber that online media indus­try pays its bills using dis­play ad rev­enue. Pages have to have ads and traf­fic sta­tis­tics are crit­i­cal to show­ing adver­tis­ers they got what they paid for. So peo­ple would really pre­fer you didn’t touch that code unless you really need to!As well as that, our CMS does require edi­to­r­ial and sales staff to han­dle raw HTML at times. That’s not their pri­mary skillset, so we pro­vide them with cheat sheets to make it eas­ier. But it does mean it’s an uncon­trolled environment.

Maxine: What did you do to over­come these issues?

Ben: Given the size of the site we couldn’t just roll up a new tem­plate and get rid of the tables. We had to wait for a major rede­vel­op­ment, when we could rebuild to stan­dards. The Australian and Australian IT were rede­vel­oped in 2007, which got us part of the way.When we launched the rede­vel­oped sites, they still didn’t val­i­date due to third party code. However they did win a PANPA award; and over time it became clear the sites were much eas­ier to main­tain after a standards-​​based rebuild. Our back­end guys started get­ting on board as well, since they could see the ben­e­fits to their workflow.All this built up trust and reas­sured the prod­uct man­ager that the site was in good hands. Plus it all started show­ing the busi­ness ben­e­fit of run­ning clean, valid code​.So when we pro­posed refor­mat­ting the ad code, the busi­ness let us do it. Our res­i­dent Javascript Ninja had already cre­ated a proof-​​of-​​concept and we were able to get that into production.With the ads cleaned up there were still lots of errors, but the val­i­da­tion reports became usable. We were able to work our way through the prob­lems, includ­ing the ones that were actu­ally our fault :) They’d been hid­den in the noise of hun­dreds of ad code errors. That cleanup process is ongo­ing for the site.

Maxine: Were there also insti­tu­tional stum­bling blocks? Got any tips on strat­egy for stan­dard­is­tas in other organisations?

Ben: Some tips for stan­dard­is­tas out there would be… Be per­sis­tent. Be an oppor­tunist. Gather allies. Pick your battles.I think per­sis­tence is the key. It took 15 months and an entire rebuild to get the Aus IT home­page to val­i­date. Being a stan­dard­ista in a large organ­i­sa­tion is a long game, not a quick win. If you’re run­ning a blog or a small project web­site, you should be able to make it val­i­date since you’re in con­trol. But when you don’t call the shots, it’s a whole dif­fer­ent game.The ad code thing ulti­mately came down to build­ing trust with the var­i­ous stake­hold­ers. I think it’s often the case that tech­nol­ogy isn’t the biggest issue, it’s the human fac­tor. You’ve got to get peo­ple to agree to things before you can do them.What’s inter­est­ing is the things which moti­vate peo­ple. We actu­ally got some lever­age from the 2007 McFarlane Prize — because the site didn’t get any­where! It gave us the oppor­tu­nity to explain why the val­i­da­tion issues meant the site just wasn’t a con­tender. Web stan­dards aren’t excit­ing to the aver­age per­son, but every­one under­stands the desire to com­pete for awards.We also had an acces­si­bil­ity win dur­ing The Australian’s rede­vel­op­ment. Our User Experience team arranged an on-​​site pre­sen­ta­tion and screen reader demon­stra­tion by a blind per­son. After that the Project Manager truly under­stood what we meant about stan­dards and acces­si­bil­ity, in fact he was fired up and talk­ing about an acces­si­bil­ity test­ing bud­get by the time he left the room. You can talk about this stuff all you like, but noth­ing beats putting a human face on it.The sheer size of the oper­a­tion comes into play as well. With so many peo­ple involved in main­te­nance you need every­one to know what they’re doing. While we have been lucky to find lots of standards-​​aware devel­op­ers, it still requires vig­i­lance to keep things on track.

Maxine: Ever onwards and upwards I’m sure. So, what’s next?

Ben:Absolutely, this is just the start. For Aus IT we still need to weed out the remain­ing errors. After that, we have an entire net­work of sites which are yet to val­i­date. So the Australian IT home­page is a mile­stone, but it’s a long road.A really encour­ag­ing thing is that some of our third party ven­dors are get­ting the mes­sage that we want valid code. That hasn’t reached pro­duc­tion yet, but we’ll keep pushing.

Maxine: What are some of the things you expect to see hap­pen­ing as more NDM sites do start to fully validate?

Ben:Valid markup is a really impor­tant base to work from — it makes it eas­ier to main­tain the sites, for one thing; which frees up time for Doing Cool Stuff. It also makes it eas­ier to start con­sid­er­ing things like wide­spread use of Microformats, run­ning mul­ti­ple stylesheets and so on. Multiple stylesheets may not be a new trick but it’s a really big one, par­tic­u­larly with the vari­ety of web-​​enabled devices out there these days.

Maxine: Thanks Ben!

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