Standards for web standards

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: ,

Web Development. URL.

Comments are closed.