Robert Nyman — An open letter to WaSP:
Web Standards are failing to break into mainstream development because the Web Standards community does not speak with a unified voice. When Web designers, Web Developers, IT managers and software vendors find information about Web Standards, instead of a succinct common approach, there are endless discussions and flame wars driven by individual interpretations of what the specs mean.
While I’m not sure I agree web standards are failing to break into mainstream development as such, it’s clearly not going fast enough — and it’s pretty rough round the edges. I’ve written about the responsibility issue of this earlier; this is not just a case of someone doing a bad job, it’s a case of not seeing the full potential of standards unfold due to ‘the good guys’ having to battle everyone else. Its 2005 and we’re still having hotshot standards developers speak at conferences about how to explain the value of doing standards to everyone else. In that respect, we definately could do with a more thourough best practice-approach aimed at developers joining in.
On the other hand, a lot of the good stuff coming out of the scene in recent years has been done by tweaking the understanding of the specs quite a bit and my fear is that no matter how well-prepared WaSP is going to be, there’ll still be attractive things done ‘outside’ the best practice approaches. That way we might introduce just another barrier; going from best practice to ‘cool’ — which I would imagine a lot of developers would want to.
This of course, doesn’t mean that there should be no proposed way of doing it right — it’s just something to think about when deciding how to communicate these best practices.
[via 456 Berea Street]
Tags: webdevelopment, webstandards