I wrote a quick note to Dan Cederholm today about something that’s been bugging me about applying web standards to full-fledged web applications, not just websites.

I was curious about how the two worlds, as I see them, coexist. Here’s my note. I’ll post a longer musing later.

Hi Dan,I met you at SXSW this year, (I was the guy at the end of your panel on Web Standards who had my company buy many copies of your book for our developers… you signed a piece of paper b/c I didn’t have my copy handy. I’m *sure* you remember. ), and I’ve been working on separating my structure from my presentation…

I guess my question is kind of philosophical. It seems like every article I read talks about starting with HTML only, then using CSS to massage the presentation. This is well and good for my own personal website (which is being overhauled to become standards compliant) but for Web APPLICATIONS, I feel it becomes a bit more complex.

My company writes software that has very unique web interfaces (afraid I can’t go into more detail than that) that usually require javascript to hide/show/move structures. I find that the strict rules can’t really apply. I try the XRAY test, as you put it, to bulletproof my designs, but I find holes. For example, say I need to show a particular structure onClick of an anchor. If I want to dismiss the same structure with another anchor, that anchor becomes visible during the XRAY test (e.g. “Close”). Therefore, this additional anchor serves no other purpose than the goals of the presentation.

Since we’re building a light application, I’m having a hard time convincing anyone to use an image as the link (to spare bandwidth)… besides, internationalizing the app would require dozens of images if text were included on that image. So what is a developer to do?

This is one of a few examples I could mention. Honestly, how does someone who is building a complicated web interface, designed by visual designers for our clients, adhere to web standards, the philosophy of structure separated from presentation, AND maintain his sanity? Are the “rules” flexible? Has anyone written an article, reference or thought around this?

What do you think?

Thanks in advance,

Clint Hall