How, many PSD 2 HTML companies claim to provide Templates in 8 Hours?
How they make it possible?
Do they use special software or techniques?
Is it really a possible to provide XHTML Strict, Semantically correct, Cross Browser compatible (even in IE6 and Opera, as some claims), W3C valid XHTML and CSS, properly commented, well optimized HTML and CSS Markup in 8 hours. even for not much complicated design.?
How they make it possible?
Do they use special software or techniques?
I don't know how everybody is doing it, but from my experience, they use both software that reads the PSD format and both a "correct" formatting of the PSD file (i.e. the right technique). So basically that software expects a "valid" PSD and produces the required templates without further manual tweaking. The whole idea is to enhance the PSD with metadata: - proper naming, proper cutting, proper properties (based on the conventions required by the specific software). After these are done manually, it's quite easy for a software to use that metadata and generate the required templates.
Is it really a possible to provide XHTML Strict, Semantically correct, Cross Browser compatible
Yes. The generation step of the software(that is using itself templates for generation), can output correct results.
even in IE6 and Opera, as some claims
No. It can include some known hacks but not 100 correct for IE.
W3C valid XHTML and CSS,
Yes. Remember - this is generated code, so it can respect to standards much easier since there's not manual intervention.
properly commented
Nope. It has only automatically generated comments - they are not very useful.
well optimized HTML and CSS Markup in 8 hours
As good as it can be automatically optimized. It doesn't take 8 hours:
So all in one, for worst case scenarios it takes ~40 minutes per template, but usually it's much much faster. Companies take the 8 hour margin to be sure that they can deliver even under heavy load.
i'd say they have a really good snippet library and they use a 'template + plugin' approach.
for example, you'd have snippets/plugins for a drop-down menu, contact form, image slider, pagination controls, image replacement etc that worked perfectly well in all major browsers and even IE6.
So if the design is not complex, all you need to do is plug in the various elements into your template and alter some CSS, which should not take more than 8 hours.
For about half of the last 10 years, I worked for a design company. Among other things, I probably did upwards of 400 projects like this. Totally custom designs drawn up in Illustrator, they'd hand the file off to me and expect a template back in no more than five business days.
When I first started, I was probably spending as much as a work week getting everything sliced up, doing all the markup, and chasing down CSS bugs (not only was I inexperienced, we still had IE 5 Win AND Mac to deal with, and even Netscape now and again). But after a dozen or two projects, I was doing most templates inside of two days.
After a hundred projects, most templates were done inside of an eight hour workday. Some easy ones under four. Usually pretty much hand coded from scratch, outside of a very small bit of boilerplate CSS & HTML.
Periodically, no matter how good I got, I'd get a pretty unusual design, or hit an unanticipated problem with the layout (usually in IE 6) and have to spend hours figuring it out, occasionally even totally recoding, so unless I were offering something with constraints on design, I'd be hesitant to guarantee that kind of turnaround. But the idea that skilled labor can generally pull this off (certainly on average) into the business model is something I wouldn't hesitate to bet on.
With enhanced tools (which others have speculated these shops have), it might even be faster.