The playing field of the web has changed alot over the years. The community that is the Internet has fought its way from the era of table-based layouts, image spacers and seas of tag soup, to a era of clean, semantic markup and of true power to communicate. Yet, the echoes of the old web still ring out today. We still worry of browser-compatibility, of screen sizes, of connection speeds, of countless tiny things that can effect disaster on our ability to effectively communicate through the web.
As a web developer, I can attest that my mind swims with concern over all these things as I build projects. I must be careful to not only code cleanly, but to code in a way that best conveys the meaning I intend. Just as in speech, it is not enough to merely say words, but the right words in the right order with the right tone, so too, markup must be just right or meaning will be lost to someone. I think of accesibility. What will this document be with images turned off? With style sheets disabled? At a lesser screen resolution? At a greater? What will it be in this browser and what will it be in that browser? And what about the various versions of each? On a Mac, a PC, or in Linux? What about on mobile phones? What about printed?
You could literally drive yourself insane with all the potential avenues for failure. I want my message to be accessible, but what exactly is accessibility? The die-hards will tell you that true accessibility is 100%: that any given user, under any given environment should be able to receive the intended message. I used to agree with that line of thinking, but working with the web daily has been whittling away at that belief, and something a coworker told me the other day chipped the rest of it away.
A coworker and I were discussing image file sizes. As a coder, I like optimized images with nice, low filesizes. As a designer, my coworker prefers quality over bandwidth conservation. I of course was defending the holy cause of accessibility and the plight of the 56k modem surfer, and then my coworker spoke a piece of wisdom so profound I could not argue any longer: if they won’t spend the money on a high speed connection, they won’t spend the money on my products either.
Before I go farther, just let me say that I personally hate the commercial nature the web has taken on. Any time I search for any sort of information, I must wade through a sea of people trying to sell me things before I can get to it. Nevertheless, this is the state of the Internet. Most everyone is selling something, and even if you run a purely informational site, you’re likely selling ad-space. Unfortunate as it may be, ‘the user’ is almost always ‘the customer’ as well, and as any marketer can tell you, the only good customer is a qualified customer: someone who is not only in the market for the product or service but who has the desire and ability to purchase it.
This is a cold outlook for sure, but at some point, somewhere, a line has to be drawn. Should I really ensure that my site will render quickly and properly in Netscape version 4 at a 640×480 resolution over a 56k dial-up connection? Probably not, since the person still using those specs is not likely to be any more willing to invest in what I have to offer than they are willing to invest in their setup.
I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t care unless someone is willing to buy our product or service, but I am saying that there’s a point where you just have to say sorry and leave people at the door. In truth, it wouldn’t be fair to those who are willing to invest in the latest and greatest to code down to the benefit of those who are not. There’s a better web to be offered, and I, for one, want to give it.
