Web Standards vs Contemporary Best Practice
Molly Holzschlag has brought a conversation to the fore again that we really need to be pushing further. In a marketing sense the worst decision the web standards movement ever made was to name their best practice recommendations as web standards. Why? Because it leads to confusion among standardistas as well as among organisations which should be transitioning their work towards contemporary best practices.
Her first post Web Standards Aren’t and the follow-up today From Web Standards Diva to Web Standards Devo are precisely about that issue. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) releases recommendations not standards. Its more complicated than pointing to a DOCTYPE at the top of a page or saying that a valid document is a web standards document. What we call web standards, and what we really mean to be contemporary best practice, include the recommended use of various technologies (including more current recommendations from the W3C) in ways which improve the business and technical outcomes of web development. These do include using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), JavaScript, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and other technologies. But web standards (or contemporary best practice) also promotes a methodology in using those technologies and recommendations.
These best practices include separation of content, presentation and behaviour by using external stylesheets and external JavaScript files. Progressive enhancement. Graceful degradation. Unobtrusive JavaScript. Semantics. Accessiblity. Plain Old Semantic HTML (POSH). It includes a broad range of best practices which look at more than the technical markup of a website to meet validation X.
Unfortunately to many people the term web standards infers the tight fisted singularity of dogmatic W3C specifications and not the broader methodologies of contemporary best practice. Molly plans to highlight this misconception in her redesign by creating a perfectly valid site using all the retro techniques like table layouts with spacer gifs to push content around. It will meet WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1 and have effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It won’t be contemporary best practice.
When a web manager turns around and tells you that their table layout using spacer gifs with a DOCTYPE of HTML 4.0 Transitional (throwing over 300+ validation errors) and using CSS to set inline font sizes is already using web standards its worth pulling back a step and rewording your reply.
We’re selling something bigger than that. And better than that. We’re selling a professional approach to web development which has solid business benefits for the developers AND the clients. That’s what web standards are about. That’s what contemporary best practices are about. If they want to save money and make money then we’ve got useful information on how to achieve proven results. We’ve got skillsets which can benefit projects they’re developing. We’ve got a social network of highly skilled individuals who are motivated to solve problems and share the results.
What’s so hard to accept about that? We just have to stop calling them web standards like we’ve got a right to throw people out of the dancehall. Its not law. Its not even compulsory. They’re recommendations. By using the term contemporary best practice we’re marketing solutions (rather than serving up admonishments). And who doesn’t want solutions? Who doesn’t want to be more successful? Molly’s recent posts are simply highlighting that deficiency in our marketing.
Can we rebrand web standards? Is it too late? I wonder…
