I have seen some articles on the web that say we shouldn't care about how our web sites look as long as they use valid mark up language and separate content from presentation.
Personally I want to design web sites that:-
1) Look good in standards compliant browsers.
"Look good" is a subjective term, but yes, I'm designing websites which look good.
2) Degrade gracefully in other browsers.
I design for standards-compliant browsers first, optimising for the future, rather than the past. Once I'm happy, I'll use a combination of the following to attack older, less compliant browsers:
1. @import (to hide the CSS from NN4, IE4, etc), so they just get plain text. I'm guessing WebTV falls into this category too.
2. IE-only conditional comments [1] to provide style-sheets targeted at IE5/5.5/6 if they're proving to be problematic with the main style sheet.
As I'm sure you're aware, "Graceful Degradation" means you (and your clients) do need to let go of pixel-perfect designs on older browsers. Make sure the content is accessible first, and then see what you can do about style on top of that.
3) Are accessible to other devices (one of my readers uses Internet Television so this is a real practical issue for me).
The beauty of standards is that most of the work is done for you here. If you mark-up your pages with structural, semantically rich XHTML without any presentational code, you've made a good start. Now, make sure that your pages function and are legible with JavaScript turned off, and with CSS turned off (or just comment out your style sheets). REALLY good start.
Then have a glance at the 508 and WAG accessibility checklists, and cover as much of it as you can within reason (another subjective term).
The biggest hurdle right now in terms of multiple devices is that a lot of hand-helds and PDAs are reading the "screen" media stylesheets, instead of the "hand-held" media stylesheets. Who knows what WebTV reads (if any).
Is this a reasonable philosophy or is there something I have missed in this debate?
Totally reasonable, well within reach, and it's all around you. There are thousands of beautiful, valid, standards-compliant, reasonably accessible, usable, cost-effective websites out there. It can be done.
Those who argue that design doesn't matter are probably not taking into account the real-world business, branding and marketing needs of my clients, which is why I think they're wrong :) I do agree that the content and code should be the primary objectives, but we can have our cake and eat it too.
--- Justin French http://indent.com.au
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