A Natural Progression
Back when the web was young, anyone who could put together a web page, no matter how messy or ugly, was a commodity. Today, to do any real web work, you have to be good. Or cheap. But let’s focus on good.
Web Standards are becoming a part of mainstream development technology. And it’s not just a fad. Here are some articles to prove it, and they’re not just for the developer. What’s being presented here is not technical. It’s real. I think it’s important for business owners, PM’s, Creative Directors, and Salespeople alike to understand this.
- The Business Value of Web Standards by Jeffrey Veen
- Web Standards: A Business Perspective by Vivabit
- The Business Case for Web Accessibility by Andy Budd
As a business person, the more work I do, the more I see businesses, vendors, and yes, even clients, specifying the use of Web Standards in their development. And why not? In my opinion, any well informed (read: non-ignorant) person can see the benefits to using Standards. (I didn’t say that they should use Standards… yet.)
So, as a developer, what does that mean for me? It means that I had better start learning this stuff… and fast. It means that I might have to change the way I think about things. Alter the way I approach development. Because if I don’t, in 2-5 years, I will be outdated. Would you hire someone who learned to develop for Netscape 4/IE 4.0 in 1997, and that was where they stopped? No way.
Times have changed. Browsers have updated. Technology has improved. We have moved on. And we are moving now. So jump on the bandwagon. Web Standards are no longer a nitche. They’re prime-time. You can keep coding with nested tables, font tags, and even stick in a MARQUEE every now an then if you want, but when we’re in competition for a contract, developing with Web Standards will make my work faster, cheaper, and just flat-out better.
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Published December 06, 2004 by:
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Well said!
December 6th, 2004
…(continued from title)…
I would not get into web development in my own opinion. Granted we all have to start somewhere…but I’d tell myself to get out of town if I told myself “Yea, I’m a web developer.”
Ha! I knew only HTML (if that). My pages were saturated with font tags heavy images…and I’d even like to say that my pages were nested deep within tables…but I didn’t even know how to use tables back then.
p tags, img tags, and the font tag was all you needed back in 96 to put together a webpage.
Anyway, like you said, focusing on the good, you’ve gotta be good! Web Standards “must” be standard. I know we bark at the developers who made NBA.com, NFL.com or Amazon…but those sites were around in an era when standards…weren’t standard.
In that case, here’s a good read by The Developers Journal called In Praise of Sloppy HTML. You’ve gotta hand it to the folks that created the big sites. We bag on them for not using web standards…but look who’s raking in the cash?
December 6th, 2004
i have dabbled with web design. my current site is a poorly done hack as something to test my server security, but i want it to be more. i am responsible for maintaining a few small club sites and have been very standards oriented in my approach.
many small clubs and organizations suffer from a non-standards based web presence stemming from a volunteer “creator” who got roped into the task. the obvious solution for them is a Frontpage template and an IE only design. this needs to be addressed – IE only designs are making it hard for standards to be the norm.
although bandwidth is not as limited as in the past (remember the days of 28.8 dialup!) designs should be light weight and should render quickly. so many sites, standards or not, focus on form before function. eye candy is nice, but does not sell the product. accessibility is key – if not, then why have a web presence – you have limited your marketing potential in the design.
2005 will see a shift toward standards simply as a result of the browser wars and popularity of handheld devices. hopefully the paradigm shift will occur at the amatuer level.
January 7th, 2005