Hand-over nerves

Last week I handed over my latest web site design to a client.

It's the fourth one I've done using cascading style sheets and XHTML, and I'm proud to say that not only does it meet requirements for triple-A accessibility, the CSS also validates. The XHTML would too except that I've used a little trick to add typographic ornaments to the page headings. They are bulleted items but enclosed within heading tags, eg:

<h1> <li>Page Title</li> </h1>

For some reason, you're not "allowed" to do that, though I can't really see why. I suppose it conflicts with semantic mark-up principles. Anyway, I'll have a think about another way of doing it but for now it's staying. In theory, future browsers may not render non-valid XHTML, but that's a long way off.

Of course the question begs: when will browser makers stop supporting non-valid mark-up? Considering that I've yet to meet a web designer who is even aware of XHTML, never mind the hundreds of thousands of non-professionals out there, I think it's a long time coming. It's the tools we use, at the end of the day, that forces our hand. When Dreamweaver MX 2004 made CSS support mandatory in sites created with it, that was a step in the right direction, but why didn't they also make the use of XHTML a de facto standard as well?

Anyway, I digress...

Something that struck me on this project (which was a redesign of an existing site) was my reluctance to hand it over. This has long been a problem with me. For some reason I am shy of hearing what others think of my work. This goes to the extent that on Sunday (yesterday) I received an email from the client, the first since I sent him the link, and I've not yet opened it, just in case he hates it!

I seem to have these two sides to my character. Sometimes, when I'm sure of myself, I am cock-sure, almost to the point of arrogance. But other times I will keep quiet to the point of missing deadlines (even though the work was finished well ahead of schedule). Not a good advert for my services, sure, but there you go.