Pat’s Point of View

I did enjoy reading a recent rant by Joe Clark regarding those who continue to ignore web-standards. Having spent many years working for digital agencies (ie: advertising agencies trying to make a quick buck from “this Internet thing”) I can testify that many high-profile, “big” websites are built with shockingly bad code. And it’s a shame.

Now I will admit that I was helping mess up the web too, prior to seeing the light. And that’s OK, the web was born in a messy way with little standardisation and a lot of us just tried to get things to work, and get the job done. But then I had a good look into XHTML, CSS etc and really got behind standards based development. Fighting our way out of the wilderness has made us stronger.

And it’s OK too if you’ve never heard of web-standards (in that case, read up), although there can’t be many of you. What’s not OK is knowing but not doing. Whether you’ve “seen the light” or somebody has told you, how can you continue with those wicked ways?

Maybe it’s pride? “my code don’t need no standards!”. Fear? they don’t want to face another learning curve? or they don’t want something/someone telling them their code is crap? It can’t be ignorance; standards, accessibility etc are major buzz words these days (anyway, there two links to WaSP in this post ;) )

So all you “old skool” folk, your days are numbered! You just wait until they turn off quirks mode :)

P

UPDATE: Well I guess if someone’s going to point out a spelling mistake in a post, it may as well be the guy who you’re quoting! Thanks Joe, yes the title for this post should have been spelt “Hear, hear” rather than the original “Here here”. This sparked some serious office debate, but the here’ers had to concede defeat upon finding an explanation of the origins of the phrase hear hear.

See what people are blogging about: web, web-standards, web standards project

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Accessibility. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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About the author

Patrick Kennedy is a user experience strategist and design researcher based in Sydney Australia. He leads research activities that improve the user experience of cross-channel products and services; helping both designers and business decision makers in bringing those products and services to fruition. Read more.