AT&T: One Full Year with Web Standards
In the fall of 2003, Vincent Murphy, Rebecca Taylor and I decided we were fed up with the usual web site yadda yadda. Taking matters into our own hands, we set our sights on bringing AT&T’s corporate site, www.att.com, into web standards-ville (kicking and screaming if necessary, we figured).
We purchased a few first class tickets, fastened our seat belts, and away we went. We navigated through thousands of pages, dovetailed our efforts with a brand new CMS, and worked to tame a new redesign that was decidedly not standards friendly out the gate.
Throughout our trip, pundits within (and without) advised we were making a big mistake:
- “Web standards can’t be applied reliably on a large scale.” (It can with templates and a CMS.)
- “We shouldn’t waste time on standards.” (We worked after hours.)
- “Standards aren’t practical on a corporate site.” (It was practical enough for Cingular and Sprint.)
- “It won’t save any money in the end.” (Last I checked, you have to spend money to make it.)
- “XHTML Strict is too strict.” (Huh?)
- “The risks and disadvantages are too many, the benefits too few.” (Enter at your own risk. <Audience shouts in response> “Take the risk!”)
“Web Standards are a fad.” (What?! Them’s fightin’ words.)
So how’d it all turn out? To paraphrase George Herbert and directly quote Neil Peart: “Doing well is the best revenge.”
Roll Call
Within one year, we had ourselves a serviceable CSS, XHTML, JavaScript blend. Not 100% across the board but we were getting there, slowly but surely, with little fanfare.
Today, about two years later, www.att.com is almost entirely composed of semantically appointed, minimalist XHTML. CSS? Check. DOM-a-gogo? Present. sIFR? Uh-huh. RSS? Yup.
(Atom and script.aculo.us? They’re on deck.)
Markup size, quality and consistency has improved by several orders of magnitude, with a night and day difference in many cases. A recent spot check of just over 3,000 pages revealed precious few validation errors, less than six on average. Out of that same 3,000, a respectable majority of almost 70% check in with zero errors. Arright! We’ll keep working to push that toward 100% too.
Meanwhile, content managers who must write markup vs. “pure content” have far less to write, so quick and painless edits are the norm, not the exception.
Design system changes are now triaged in one place (“Don’t Repeat Yourself”) and propagate site-wide in one swell foop.
Time previously spent firefighting is now split between educating content managers, listening to our design and content peers, making steady improvements … plus tackling projects that would not otherwise have seen the light of day. (While there are still the inevitable fires here and there, they don’t tend to concern web pages in the ultra-dramatic way they used to.)
Sharing the Love
Our CSS and JavaScript collections have since been organized into an “AT&T Standards Library” and offered to other “att.com” sites, complete with development guidelines and a helping hand.
A few sites have taken us up on the offer. They now enjoy regular design system updates without the headache of reworking their site each time. Others, meanwhile, have politely declined, with some even opting to redo their whole kit and kaboodle from scratch. Yee-owch!
To be fair, that was completely expected. Besides, we always wanted to lead by example. “Show don’t tell,” that’s what we’re all about.
Um, except for this here “tell” part I suppose. But I digress … there’s more:
Great Google-y Moogle-y!
Searching for standards? Step right up.
Today, with the launch of our upgraded Google Search Appliances, our site-wide “Powered By Google” search joins the XHTML-friendly camp!
While the new GSAs are chock full of wonderful new features and improvements, there has long since been tons-o-invalid markup baked into the out-of-the-box XSL template. This time around, I happened to read an open letter to Google by Mark Kawakami that, at last, got me motivated to tame that XSLT beast.
The first time I tried it (in March 2005) it was a flop and didn’t see the light of day. Oh well, not the first time that’s happened. The second time (June through August) I had far better results thanks in large part to Marc Liyanage’s TestXSLT, which allowed Vincent and I to play “what if” with reckless abandon.
I’d like to think I’m somewhat adept at XSLT by now, but this was no trivial mod. Navigating an XSLT of this size and scope is a lot like playing Operation, “the wacky doctor game.” We were breaking the XSLT warranty seal in a sense, and didn’t want to lose the ability to apply Google’s XSLT updates to our modified version. Thus, we couldn’t do a total rewrite. Yep. Funsville.
But it worked out. What I’m most pleased with is that, unlike our previous attempt, this revision gracefully coexists with, but is not dependent upon, our standards libraries. That makes it a no-brainer for us to share the XSLT with Google Support in return. Hopefully they can put this to good use in future Search Appliance revisions. (Perhaps elsewhere. Hmm!)
Are we done? Not quite. The revised markup could stand some refactoring and nip-and-tuck under the hood, for one thing. We made it work, so now we can focus on making it “right.”
One thing I’m actually bummed about is our inability to coerce those handy-dandy “cached” results pages into well-formedness as well. This is due to how the page markup “proper” is passed through the XSLT. (Google support has been notified, and we’re discussing our options on the support forum.)
That means, for now, cached pages are rendered much like they are on google.com: a <base href> and <table>-enclosed prologue is inserted at the very start of the page … before the DOCTYPE … which throws the browser into quirks mode … and then it’s all downhill from there.
We’ll keep at it though, because we’re stubborn that way.
More att.com Q&A
UPDATE: In still other news, please be advised that the inimitable James Archer and The Weekly Standards has posted our followup to the March 2005 feature about www.att.com and our web standards road trip. This time, we’re diving in to a variety of behind-the-scenes page snippet examples and illustrations, plus we’ll have a bit-o-Q&A. Enjoy.
We’ll Be Right Back
One final note. As you may (or may not?) be aware, there’s a li’l changing of the guard forthcoming.
What does this mean for the future of our web standards efforts to date? I can’t even begin to speculate but, of course, the recent news about an until-recently notable “corporate site with standards” example is definitely on my mind.
No matter what happens, I’m incredibly pleased - and proud - to have helped www.att.com and others at AT&T evolve from a hodgepodge of largely nutritionless mid ’90s-era markup to their current leaner, healthier state.
What a difference two years has made! I wouldn’t trade it for anything less.
UPDATE: www.att.com has begun to officially change hands. Read all about it.
Man, 1993? Other than that, good stuff. Keep it up!
Posted by: Mark Wubben | 15 November 2005 at 12:09