I can see why big companies have a hard time getting traction with new systems. Today I had amusing conversations with two web design opinions at opposite ends of our organization, both doing web development: one wants to build an all-Flash version of our marketing web site, and the other wants to remove all graphic files from our intranet and have only text.
My stuff tends to walk the line between the two extremes: I use ornamental graphics, very light in size, to break up text. I’ve never used a Flash menu, never use animated gifs, and I don’t think I even use image swaps anymore. If anything, I’d say I’m fairly conservative when it comes to graphics. None of my sites have ever used canned clip art or stock photos (I’m not involved with our marketing site), although the upcoming iteration of our customer site will have some cartoonish icons to break up the menus.
This personal site is a good example: sure, I use ornamental graphics at the top, but the whole site is navigable with images turned off. Heck, I even validate my HTML, and I’m usually pretty close to standard, if not completely standard. (The blog pages are an exception, because they’re generated by MovableType, which tends to do some wild stuff.)I guarantee you that I’m the only developer in the company who even knows what validating HTML means. There’s a couple of other people who understand the concept, but they’re not web developers.
The funniest part is that both of the people who delivered the above opinions consider ME an extremist for different reasons.