Web Standards Crisis?
Interesting debate going on over at Jeffrey Zeldman’s site about the state of web standards. Just last week Jeffrey was profiled in an article in BusinessWeek with the title “Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards. It’s a great article showing the grassroots effort he co-founded to get the browser companies to follow the W3C’s standards.
As for a crisis in web standards, there is none. Yes, there hasn’t been a ton of movement on CSS 3 and HTML 5, but thats not a crisis. More and more sites every day use and follow web standards and it’s been an amazing shift in the last 4 to 5 years. Most of the talk of a crisis is related to having new tools for web designers. Because these are voluntary standards and are not owned by one single company that can force compliance, progress will be slow.
Lets not forget how bad it was back in 1999 with the browser wars wreaking havoc on the web design profession. The whole web standards movement is mostly responsible for the growth of Firefox and in helping Microsoft get off their asses and make IE 7. Lets not whine too much, because it could be a lot worse.
→ David @ September 17th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Well said. My life’s been easier since IE7 arrived.
→ mike pan @ September 20th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
frankly, i am surprised web developers have not embraced browser-independent technology such as flash with more enthusiasm and rather adopted the relatively buggy AJAX approach. Just look at the 08 .Mac gallery, almost 20KB of Javascript!