Web Standards
Was reading an old post about the developments of the Frontpage 12 application. The post itself is really old, it’s from October 23, 2005.
There was one paragraph that just got me to thinking about something, web standards.
Another trend we’ve seen is that the desire to build web sites around web standards, specifically the use of XHTML and CSS has increased dramatically in the last few years (refer to the IE team’s blog for discussion about IE’s improving support for standards). There are several reasons driving this, but certainly the desire to support a range of browsers and platforms, a variety of devices, and accessibility requirements (section 508 and WCAG) are all contributing. There is also a certain of amount of this change due to maturity in the technology (browsers and standards) and design practices used by web professionals - the XHTML/CSS approach is just a better way to build sites compared to HTML/tables/spacer gif layout - easier to maintain, better performing, more accessible.
The specific line that caught my attention was “…for discussion about IE’s improving support for standards).”
I’m probably oversimplifying this, but why do we need to improve support for web standards. The W3C has already established standards that are widely accepted as “standards”. Why wouldn’t every browser, whether it be Firefox, IE7, Opera, Safari, etc., completely support these already defined standards?
Is it a question of backwards compatibility? What if you had a feature within each browser to display the site using the rendering engine of a previous version? I’m sure that would probably significantly bulk up the code, but wouldn’t it be worth it? If you visited a site in IE7 that didn’t render correctly, you could just go to your “View” menu and choose an earlier version to display the site in. Windows XP kind of has this function by being able to run a program in an earlier version of Windows.
Are the problems because of all the sites that have been developed that don’t follow the standards? Would there be so many broken sites that the public backlash is worse than a browser that doesn’t support the standards. Wouldn’t that force everyone (myself included) to design and develop sites that better adhere to the standards already established?
Now it’s your turn…Ready, Aim, Fire those comments back at me!
Source: A higher bar by Rob Mauceri’s FrontPage Blog
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