A Web Standard No One Talks About by Brent @ 11:19 am on 29.05.08

Day in and day out, I am here, at my computer, furiously building websites. I work for a small company and I am a one man team. I try extremely hard to maintain high standards for my work (ie, the W3C). This takes quite a bit of extra effort, but I feel (and our clients feel) that it is worth it.

In my work, I deal with a variety of clients and a variety of project managers. Each has their own way to doing things, which is to be expected. But the change I propose to the world (cause I am sure that’s how many people read stupideverything) is a change in one standard: content delivery.

Every project has a few essential documents:

• Proposal and Budget
• Site Map
• Site Content
• and perhaps a wireframe document

Each of these really makes my job easier. But here is where I want to switch things up: STOP USING MICROSOFT PRODUCTS.

We have designers on Macs, account people on PCs, clients on Macs and PCs, developers on Linux, Mac, PC. Everyone has Blackberries, Windows Mobile phones, iPhone, Treo’s, etc. We are all sharing and editing these documents. Deveoplers, especially are opening these documents constantly, copying and pasting content from the copywritters, checking the for revised versions of the site map to update the navigation. The documents get used, they are tools.

I propose the documents essential to the developers (site map and content documents) need to be in PLAIN TEXT. You don’t need to format these documents. We don’t need fonts or typefaces defined in this document, the designers have prepared style guides, and developers are writting standards-based CSS to interpret the content. Adding margins and tabs and crazy bullet lists to the your Word 97 document are really making it hard for us developers to dump the content into the site quickly.

The main problem with using a MS product for these essential documents is versioning of the Office software itself. There are so many versions of MS Office out there, and for multiple platforms. It is nearly impossible to get all of the stakeholders in the website on the same platform, using the same version of Office. So all of those nifty sharing features and revision features go right out the window. Our small business clients are not upgrading their version of office each time there is a release.

A secondary problem with using MS products, and sort of a personal pet peeve, is that in order for me to get some small detail of the site, like the title of a section of content, I have to fire up MS Office. I am already running a tonne of browers for testing, text editors for writing the code. I probably have Photoshop or Illustrator running and for sure I have some mp3s playing. Opening Office just to get the wording of a title is not convientent in the least.

Another problem, although probably another topic entirely, is the blatant abuse of MS Excel. This is not good software for creating a site map or wireframe documents. Just because it looks like a sheet of graph paper when you open it, doesn’t mean that’s how you should treat it. Excel is not a database, it is not a text editor and it is not a design program.

I propose we use PLAIN TEXT DOCUMENTS. That’s right, ASCII. It renders the same on every machine, it is very fast to open, and its small file size makes it easy to store and email to people on mobile devices. No one every says “Dang, I can’t open this .txt file! I don’t have the right version of Notepad!” or “Man, Notepad just crashed my machine! I hadn’t saved anything!” or “Notepad is taking forver to open.”

Now, MS Office has it’s place for sure. When writting large documents or anything you intend to print or where you want to have a writter style a document, MS Word is great.

This should be your guiding principle:
Any project where the final deliverable is NOT something with the extenions .doc, .xls or .ppt, DO NOT use MS Office.

Let’s do everyone a favour and open Notepad/TextEdit/vim right now.

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