One True Layout and the Browsers
So it has come to pass that with the development of the latest version of our company's content management system, we are going to try to implement the one true layout concept as set out for standards compliance. My boss and I have had an on and off discussion about this concept for a little over a year, and a recent project that we have been working on has once again brought it back to the front burner.
The situation arose where a client came to realize that the layout that they had approved did not work when it came to mobile devices, and had issues with accessibility compliance. Of course we had warned the designers of this from the start but they had insisted, so we built what they wanted and then it came back and bit them. We then had to go back in and program the site to also be accessible. This took a fair bit of effort as the designer and the client still wanted the site to function as originally designed. Unfortunately this meant that we had to do some rather distasteful hacking to get it to work both ways.
So as we were working on putting together a stylesheet for mobile devices the conversation again reared its head regarding the one true layout where the separation of design and content was the key goal. As I was building the stylesheet and testing it became increasingly apparent that the best way to handle a mobile stylesheet, which really requires the content to appear first, the html code should render the content first and we should use CSS to position everything else in the site. While we could not really apply this to this particular client's site as it would take much effort and we would not be paid for that effort, it required us to do some proper experimentation in order to figure out how to make things work for this particular client. As a result we were able to test and apply the One True Layout to our basic CMS install.
From this point forward, our basic install for any site we work on will now start out in the One True Layout. Also from this point on we will not be applying full compliance for Internet Explorer 6. At ten years old, it is now an obsolete browser and supporting it actually costs our clients more money than it is worth. We will still apply a basic stylesheet to ensure that it is legible in that browser, but we will no longer be applying designs and functionality that the browser itself cannot support. In other words kids, its time to upgrade your browsers. Microsoft sends updates on an almost daily basis and Internet Explorer is currently at version 8.
As a friendly reminder to the government IT people. It may seem like an awful lot of effort to keep government computer networks up to date, but think about how much more effort it is to clean up and fix computers that are many years out of date. As with almost everything, a little preventative maintenance on a regular basis is better than a full on overhaul in a pinch. Remember, web standards are ever changing just like the technology that it runs on. To become complacent in this field is to fall behind, and that very quickly.