Web Standards Get Love from Mainstream Media
Posted by Ben Chinn on August 14th, 2007We’re big fans of Web Standards here at IBG so it was gratifying to see BusinessWeek’s article, Jeffrey Zeldman: King of Web Standards. Zeldman has been instrumental in advocating for the use of web standards in browsers and by web designers and developers. In the bad old days different browsers rendered sites in different ways forcing developers to code several versions of the same web site. Thanks to the institution of a standard set of web practices (including technologies such as HTML for content and CSS for style) developers can code once and users can expect to see web sites looking the way they are supposed to no matter what browser they have. Some folks still aren’t totally on board with standards (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) but some degree of standards compliance is now the norm for browsers and web sites.
The benefits of web standards are manifold: greater accessibility, lower bandwidth overhead, greater efficiency in development and redesign, consistency into the future and more. Jeffrey Zeldman showed web developers, myself included, the basics of web standards in his book Designing With Web Standards and continues to fight the good fight on his website and as publisher and creative director of the web standards focused webzine A List Apart. The BusinessWeek article gives a more in depth look at Zeldman than I’ve done here and includes a slide show that serves as a brief primer on some aspects of web standards.
On a related note: I’m going to be attending the An Event Apart conference co-hosted by Jeffrey Zeldman later this month. I hope to report back with new ideas on best practices that will help improve the experience of our clients and their customers – in a standards compliant way of course.
