I Love It When a Plan Comes Together

I love it when a plan comes together. The Templates are about to deployed here at work, the product of a lot of people spending a lot of hours working on a lot of solutions, and then choosing one and making it the best.

Early-on, we started this knowing that whatever we ended up with, it would be the page we looked at for at least three years—maybe even longer. So, like a car designer, we had to try to peer into the future a little ways and figure out what kind of a market we would be selling into. It takes about three years to design a new car, too.

Today, the language we use to mark up our pages is XHTML. Would that be the best choice for 2012, though? We use version 1.0, Transitional. Would there be any advantage in moving to another definition, such as Strict at this point? There were two working groups when we started, one was at work on building a new XHTML, XHTML 2. The other—wonder of wonders—was hard at work building a proposed new HTML 5. If you have ever taken my HTML training, you know that for years now I have been dancing around telling people that they can learn all of HTML, because there wouldn’t be another one. HTML 4.01 was supposed to be the last.

So, how would you have bet? We hashed it out for a while and decided to stick with XHTML 1.0, Transitional. It’s been good to us, so far. People seem comfortable using it. It has good fidelity between platforms and browsers. And just a week after we made that decision, the XHTML 2 committee came apart at the seams. So it may be a long, long time before we get any new markup languages. When that day comes, we will probably examine things again, surveying the then-current landscape and trying to puzzle-out the future.

We are learning as we go, in this process. Things won’t always be as they are now, the second rule of investing, applies here. Just as we cannot know about inflation, unemployment, advances in technologies or disruptions in supply lines years ahead we don’t really know who will be building the Template of 2020, or how. I’m reminded of that every time we talk about the heading area of the page, today. The editable area is still named “titlegraphic” from the days years ago when it actually was an image file. If we only knew, then, what we know today, we could have done a much better job all along.

Still, we expect transmission speeds inside the buildings to stay about the same or improve slightly. We expect the normative screen size to stay about the same or increase, slightly. We expect that handheld devices are not going to suddenly become less popular in the years ahead and so we will soon begin looking at ways to better include them in our design considerations.

And we expect to again lead the way in validated pages and accessible design. That’s something I am really proud of. We lead the league in Good Pages, something I point out at every training session.

I’m talking here like we are done with everything for this next cycle. We are not. The work continues, fleshing out this or that deficiency and smoothing over this or that awkward feature. That kind of thing continues right up until deployment of the next Template. But for now, even though we aren’t done we have come to most visible checkpoint in the process, the one with the most rapid and convincing change. And now, looking back, it’s really amazing at what all we did. I love it when a plan comes together.