Opening Africa: Adopting Web Standards on the Continent
By Silumesii Maboshe
The Web Standards debate is a heated one. There are experts around the world who advocate global standards adoption, but for Africa it is not that simple. The "standards" being evangelised are not supported by all browsers. Should we all throw Internet Explorer out and move unanimously to Opera? Can't we all just get along?
Web Standards are a good thing and Africa needs them. If the world were a classroom and the continents its students, Africa would be lucky to get a passing grade on a Web Standards test.
In this regard, I can't help but see similarities in the adoption of Internet standards with our own continental history: several clusters, each with its own language trying to thrive while, for the most part, respecting every other's right of being.
The Key Components
The browser is the key tool in allowing us interface with our data and applications. At the core of browser operations are technologies we have come to know and love: (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The relationship between the triad is called MVC which stands for Model-View-Control. The languages that end in "ML" control document structure, the "model". CSS is used to control how this document structure is displayed, that is the "view". JavaScript (or an equivalent scripting language) takes care of an applications behaviour and is thus the control component.
Each part does its work expertly and seeing them work in concert is a wonderful thing. Examples of this symbiosis can be seen on applications by 37signals.
The Role of the Web Developer
Opening Africa is going to take seriousness on the part of our web developers. It is your responsibility and yours alone to ensure that your websites are standards compliant.
Users can join in by spreading the word and going as far as not visiting sites that do not validate. This is not as drastic a measure as one may think. If I had a cow for every time I went to the Lusaka Stock Exchange website and could not read the stock ticker feed because the markup is invalid, I'd have enough bride price for my grandchildren's weddings.
Now, imagine the actual investment the exchange has lost.
Reader comments
You are quite right Sir in suggesting that African web developers should adopt a web standard. However, most of the technologies in the hands of African's (mostly Microsoft products) do not support open web standards; and by the way this is out of choice. Thus if the goal of the African web developer is to reach a wider audience on a shoe-string budget; it sometimes means knowingly violating the desired standard. But again, there is always a way, it all depends on what you want to accomplish. You could adopt the standards and be limited in the number of internet user's supported or better yet, do both; it all depends on the size of your pocket.
In the past few months, I've really realised just how many Ugandan bloggers are out there. It's like waking up one day and you wonder if you've been in hibernation too long. And some of them have very decent looking templates. Some might look similar, but somehow they stand out, mostly due to the author preferences, and content.
Blog themes tend to be very web 2.0-esque, simple clean outlines, high legibility, and almost minimalistic straight forward content/entry flow. All in all, they are a lot simpler than some of the sites we design (static or dynamic)
I've themed a couple of wordpress templates, and too many joomla templates to count. I highly doubt a wordpress / blogger template is going to be more stress than a full blown joomla portal template. The biggest issue would be the blogger's preference.
I'd also want to disagree with ivan a little. You do not have to get your own hosting to install your own wordpress template. Last time I checked all you need is ftp access, some php knowledge and you can install your own thing, either done by yourself or custom made by someone else. I don't have an account at blogger or wordpress, so I can't really tell if they give you php support. Someone can clarify on this.
Finally, a decent hosting firm should be able to handle blog hosting. All you need is a database, it's access details and php support. Any hosting firm worth it's salt should be able to handle this.
Cheers...
PS, I don't really want to call our hosting "cheap". I prefer "affordable". Semantics and all that, but seriously, there's nothing cheap about our hosting.
The financial issue is worth in-depth discussion. I'd, brielfly, like to argue that it takes no more money to produce a standards compliant site than it does a non-compliant one. In fact I'll go further to say that in the long run, a compliant site is less expensive;
The tools to validate markup (CSS, XHTML, RSS, Atom etc) are freely avalialable for as long as the developer has access to the internet. Once that "investment" is made, the site will be viewable on more internet enabled devices. For example, if I choose to go the non-compliant route and develop for a particular browser, I lock myself in and risk having to re-work the site if the browser I am developing for gets updated - that means money out of my pocket.
As for reaching a wider audience, I have more chance of reaching a wider audience if my markup is valid. The goal of the African Web Developer, therefore, is to develop for every internet enabled device and not just web browsers on desktop computers. For that to work valid markup is paramount.
For the sake of balancing out the discussion, here is a web-standards counter-argument.
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