My OperaAre Web Standards In Trouble?
Thursday, August 16, 2007 5:55:08 AM
If you've been paying attention to Molly Holzschlag's blog lately, you might have noticed she's been griping about the problems plaguing the W3C and the work being done by WHATWG on furthering the HTML specification. In fact, she's not just griping about it, she's bitching about it. And I for one think she's right. I'll leave the politics of the W3C and WHATWG to you, since I have my own opinions on the subjects, but I will touch upon what I believe has brought this situation to a head.
Aside from all the bickering about the joke that is (X)HTML 5, I see two real causes for concern with regard to the current standards situation. Language development and browser support/implementation. Which, when you think about it, actually go hand in hand. Languages help set the standard (anyone can draft a document and call it a standard, but if you get enough people to use it, it will likely become the standard (at least somewhere anyway).
The W3C has developed languages for the Web that designers want to use today, however, the glacially slow pace that the Consortium works has given browser developers little reason to implement those technologies (it took how long for CSS 2.1 to reach candidate recommendation status?). Meanwhile you have browser developers trying to fill the gap by introducing their own proprietary standards (you can do what you want, as long as you do it my way), which just will get us back to the wild times of the mid-to-late 90s. I was in high school at the time, and I remember my school library having both Netscape and Internet Explorer installed on its computers because of how fragmented the Web had become. But I'll touch upon that later.
Not only that, but some of these same developers are also taking forever to implement the current standards in their products - and I'm not just talking about Microsoft either. The Mozilla Corporation/Foundation does share some of the blame for this as well (for example, how Gecko still doesn't support colgroups - to the best of my knowledge anyway).
So you have vendors implementing proprietary technologies at the expense of current technologies which currently exist and do the job just as well, and then you have these promising technologies (like CSS 3 for example) that are being developed, but at such a slow pace that we'll all probably have retired by the time they become recommendations, which means it'll just take that much longer for the vendors to implement them in the browsers that people use on a daily basis to really matter because they're too busy pushing their latest flavor of the month proprietary "solution" when in fact their lack of adherence to the standards (and their resistance to implementing them completely) is the real root of (half of) the problem.
The end result will probably be a return to the "Wild Wild Web" days of the mid-to-late 90s, but with properietary plugins and band-aids replacing open standards which sacrifices the accessibility and ease of use of the Web sites we make today. I guess that we'll have to get used to "Best Viewed Using Silverlight and Internet Explorer 7 at 1024x768" instead of giving people the choice they rightfully deserve of which software to use if everything does come falling apart.
The solution? We all as a community need to get off our duffs and educate people. I don't mean sitting at conferences stuffing our faces with free food talking to thin air. I mean getting out there and telling people what needs to be said. Teaching in the field. I do this already, where I not only mentor others at SitePoint, but also help educate people on other Web design/development sites/forums such as Digital Point, IWDN and WebDeveloper.com - we need to get out and reach the average designer/developer, and show them that "Web standards" is not some elitist country club, but truely a better way to make Web sites.
We need to get our Web design/development friends, drag them to a bar or restaraunt and just TALK standards - no need for a fancy-schmancy conference. Just talk about how we make Web sites the same way we talk about our favorite baseball teams (Go Cubs!) or football teams (Bear Down!). We need to light the fires in their bellys and make them want to talk to their co-workers about this, and learn how to use standards themselves. And then we all as an industry need to walk straight up to our bosses and tell them where to shove their bad code and hair-brained ideas so we cna start making Web sites for people, not marketing departments.
Get enough people doing this, and the W3C and browser developers just might take notice. Of course, it's just an idea. We've had wilder ones pop up before (looks at Jeffrey Zeldman and remembers the CNN interview - was that CNN? - where he defended the goals of the standards movement back in 98-99 while everyone else was content to make six different versions of the exact same Web site just so they can make six times as much money)... hey don't look at me like that, stranger things have happened you know.
