Why Web Standards?
When it comes to the web there are a hundred different ways to accomplish any one thing. The key disciplines in internet programming are structure, style, client-side logic, server-side logic, and storage. There are plenty of languages out there to satisfy each discipline, but they can become obsolete/unused and as the nature of the technologies running the code change, the languages themselves must adapt and change.
New innovations and concepts start to pile up as they are discovered in a given language and each developer having to hand code themselves a suite of special functions and method's to take advantage is a massive waste of resources--enter the framework. Frameworks are an incredibly important time saving tool for web developers. Aside from exploiting a given language from every possible angle and putting all that power into the hands of the developer. They make it easy for us to write neater more efficient code, often in more legible and fluent syntax than the original language offered. Frameworks allow the developer to bypass issues like those caused by cross-browser rendering engines, security, and high level language exploits as the necessary work-arounds and hacks are built into the framework. Frameworks are developed by communities, individuals, organizations, and private companies. The luxury of having a team of people working the kinks out of a language and the way it's interpreted is a great one, but it comes at a price. Each framework is developed at a different pace, in a different order, often with a different purpose in mind.
So what is the best approach to web development? What is the most effective suite of languages and practices? In the democracy of the web it's important to understand that any given approach is only as good as the support it gets; from the creators, developers, and end users. These are the main factors: which languages, frameworks, and practices are supported and innovated upon by it's creators the most; to the finest degree, which are contributed to and used and documented by the most developers, and which are the most amount of end users capable of viewing. Most end users don't have the experience to question the browser or plugins with which they view the web. They don't care or think about how they get to a virtual destination, they just want to get there and they want everything to work when they do.
Due to the politics and business deals of the major players the long standing state of the web has been one of division. End users stuck with browsers that came with their computers, and those who went in search of more functionality (bookmarks, tabs, etc.), or neglect to update, creates a situation where everyone's using different browsers and versions with different interpreters for the code on any given web site. A system where one line of code can be interpreted in 10 different ways depending on the end users who don't have the know-how or control to deal with it, is an immature one.
Even in the early growth of the internet these problems were apparent and so the Web Standards movement was born. An increasing amount of web communities, organizations, developers, and private companies are adopting web standards, even the biggest violator of these standards Internet Explorer--infamous for deliberately misinterpreting standards based code in favour of it's own proprietary code, is in development to finally be standards complient. Microsoft claims IE 8 is finally going to adopt many, if not all web standards, but is still in the beginning stages of development, even when they do everyone who uses IE6 and IE7 will not upgrade and so for a very long time it will likely be yet another cross-browser concern. It's important to note that even between the current standards compliant browsers, there is still some wiggle room of how they interpret the standards, some of which can affect user experience and site functionality to a relatively large degree.
Until web standards are refined to a point where one line of code has one universal interpretation and the democracy of the web is ruled by those standards and viewed by standards compliant browsers we are stuck having to hack away at code to make our sites and applications usable by as many people as possible. I believe to move towards a culture where our beliefs and values are reality and commonplace, we each have to practice those beliefs and values, regardless of whether they are accepted by our current culture, the norm, or the majority. So anyone reading this visit [http://w3c.org], get a standards compliant browser, I love Firefox 3 [http://firefox.com], and write standards compliant code.
Tags: browsers, Firefox, IE, w3c, web applications, web standards
