Web Standards Are Dumb?

Whatever.

Site Link: Web Standards Are Dumb?

Comments

1. Tim said:

Forgive me, but APCMag.com site isn’t posting my response, and I’m all riled up:

Holy cow, what an incredibly *ignorant* rant. While I can only hope that it is an example of satire gone awry, I don’t think it is. And I can only repeat what others have already said (and will continue to say), but I can’t help it:

1. We don’t use standards so our sites are “compatible with the handhelds of next century,” we use standards so our sites are compatible with the next version of whatever browser comes out next month, and the next month, and heck, maybe next century, I suppose.

2. “Whatever happened to trial by market”? You’re living it baby. If CSS weren’t a reasonable solution, no one would be using it. You make that point yourself later in the column: “Many other W3C recommendations [SMIL, MathML and SVG] have failed to gain any traction.” Which brings up another point: Are you under the illusion that every product brought to market is expected to succeed? Something like 9 out of 10 new products fail – developed by committee or not.

3. CSS is great, “but”:

a. “you need a degree to understand them” – What kind of bunk is this? I know 12-year-olds who know CSS inside and out. None of them have degrees.

b. “Microsoft doesnt care about them” – I can’t help but get trite here: Microsoft doesn’t care about a lot of stuff, like Linux and PHP and OS X and, oh, *the Web* when it was first introduced to the public, all of which are successful and used by millions of people. If Microsoft didn’t care about traffic laws, would you stop feeding the meter?

c. “they suck.” So does your column, nyeah.

4. “CSS [has] been promoted as “the future” since the mid-90s, and by now the only thing keeping [it] alive is a steady stream of guilt and the occasional Movable Type installation.” Guilt? I *love* CSS. Separation of content and presentation is the bee’s knee’s, the cat’s pyjamas.

And why drag Movable Type into it? MT is a fanatastic product, free for personal use, driven by Perl, and is so easy to customize that even though the standard templates are XHTML- and CSS-driven, there’s no reason you can’t build a tables-based MT template. More power to you.

5. “Standards cronies have now latched on to the disabled … for leverage” Holy crow, insensitivity, thy name is David. Never mind that accessibility is the law for US governmental sites (or all sites in the UK), providing accessible products for the disabled is important because *some people are disabled*. Some statistics show that 10% of the US population is disabled. Perhaps those folks will eventually stop “frolicking in the meadows” and tell the publishers what they think of your views.

6. You want to use Flash and PDF? No one is stopping you. In fact, a few other people use them too.

7. “All that matters is the desire to communicate, and the ability to steal any good thing that gets invented. Like Sputnik.”

Did someone steal Sputnik and I missed it?

Is it on eBay?

Posted on April 21, 2004 09:00 AM | #