What is a good standard? According to my economics professor, a standard is just the dominant design in an industry. This means that if your company is first with an application it might actually create the standard.
Standards give us lots of things:
- they allow us to write web pages that display on most browsers
- they allow us to write XML applications that will work in other locations than where we wrote them
- they allow us to switch between computers and software without difficulty
But even with all the benefits of standards, it's still very common for developers to write programs that are not standards-based.
Why would someone do this?
There are many reasons:
- they are required to by their company
- they want their program to be the new standard
- they can't be bothered
- they don't realize there is a standard
A little while ago Marko Karppinen went to the W3C to determine whether they follow their own standards. What he found was that they don't. In fact, over 80 percent of the member home pages were not compliant with the HTML or XHTML standard. Combine this with the fact that authoring companies are not compliant and you end up with a large gap in how pages are designed - even though the browsers are now mostly compliant.
What good is a Standard?
I have been told that learning HTML is difficult, and so any tool or program that allows someone to write in a WYSIWYG format (like Microsoft Word or other word processors) is a good thing. While I don't necessarily agree that HTML is difficult, I do agree that authoring tools (like Dreamweaver and GoLive) make it easier to build a Web page. Standards make this possible.
If we didn't have a standard, we would have hundreds of different Web protocols all vying for your Web browser and you. Imagine if there were no standard for where to put the gas pedal in a car - every car would be different. You would have to get a separate license to drive an Audi and a Honda.
In the world of the Web, having standard tags for bold, italics, lists, links, and so on insures that we can have a choice of what Web browsers and applications we want to use. If we're comfortable using Notepad we can still post pages comparable to someone writing in an online tool on Geocities or someone using Dreamweaver. But when the standards aren't followed, we can't use standardized tools, we can't use standardized browsers, and we lose all the benefits of standards.
What Can We Do?
- Know the standards. If you're not familiar with them, you won't know if your pages are compliant.
- Use standards compliant browsers. This means upgrading to the most recent version of your favorite, most of the current versions are compliant.
- Use standards compliant authoring tools and editors. If you don't know if your favorite tool is, find out.
- Validate your Web pages for compliance.
- Hold other Web developers up to the same standard. If you see a site that is not compliant, ask them why not. And before you email me, I know the About pages are not compliant - it's not up to me. Write to About's Customer Care to comment.
