MikePadgett.com

Web Standards

— What progression we have in the field of web development is thanks in no small part to Jeffrey Zeldman.”

I’m currently two-thirds through Jeffrey Zeldman‘s “Designing with Web Standards”.

It was published only a couple of years ago (a long time in Web world, of course) and it’s interesting to trace the arc of developments since then.

Whilst much of the methodology described in the book is becoming increasingly normal nowadays, I certainly wasn’t aware of the scale of Zeldman’s achievements with regard to ending the so-called Browser Wars with the Web Standards Project until now.

Web standards implementation as a strategy has exploded into the forefront of my job, so it is now important to put together a strong business case in order to get buy-in from developers and management. It is no longer enough, it seems, to encourage topical best practice from colleagues.

For many people I’m dealing with, the understanding of (X)HTML standards seems to be quite practical – “table avoidance” is one of the most visible concerns and, as Zeldman also points out, the problem of automatically generated code from content management applications.

Time will tell how far I can take it, especially for internal systems, but it looks set to be a pretty lonely path for now!