Evolutionary Standardistas
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Do you remember when you discovered the awesomeness of creating web pages? For me it was about six years ago and my first foray with the web was The Idiots Guide to Creating Web Pages – ewww, too right. It was about the time I enrolled in a Bachelor of Computing at university, and I’d also enrolled in a Certificate 4 in Website Design at TAFE College. The teacher of that course, Mike Marinos, was a Web Standardista.
So my discovery of Web Standards was spoon fed from Mike through exposure to a huge number of resources that espoused a radical and unpopular theory – web pages should be quality products. While the web is a robust medium it doesn’t mean we should just create any old crap that works; we were all talking scientifically and justifying the business case (yes, I got caught up in it quite fast).
With revolution comes a certain passion. Web Standardistas seem to start out with a devout dogmatic passion of the inquisition to drag down and burn all the non-conforming everybody they can get there hands on. Right answers and wrong answers are black and white in that stage of the (R)evolution. I think we can all see a cringe-worthy moment from our past in that picture. At some point we commented on someone’s website telling them they were crap at their job. In fact, I’ve had a smattering of faymus web standards names tell me over the years, here and on other incarnations of this blog, that I’m a dumb anti-christ fucker upper of HTML and other sundry technologies… for example, John Oxton of the Rissington Podcast simply commented that the site was fucked. Brilliant. Take a lollypop and fuck off home, I guess… oh those were joyous times…
