Who You Calling A Jesse?

It’s funny, I have been loosing that standards preaching feeling lately. It just seems like more people nod your heads when you mention standards. Should I feel like the Web Standards War (is it a war? I suppose you could call it that) is over since IE 7 is just catching up to Firefox and CSS seems to be everywhere? Do Web Standards still matter? Of course web standards still matter according to Roger Johansson in an article over on Vitamin. Roger Johansson makes a mention on his blog as well, you can follow the thread ;) Robert Nyman makes the point that the war is far from over – developers get it, well they might know the W3 exists, but do they really get why?

I must admit that I don’t get all the ins and outs of the XHTML vs HTML debate (and I really don’t care that much) but I do know that having valid code makes life so much easier. It is when you start using non-standard hacks is when you get into trouble. Same goes for coding and best practices (maybe not a W3 standard but certainly important). I am not a PHP guy by any stretch but if you follow best practices the code is nice for the next Co-op/Web Developer that comes along. This term Sasha has pretty much picked up where Mitch left off… That hasn’t happened that smoothly before.

When I think best practices and then look at something like Spry just coming out (or other AJAX frameworks for that matter) that appear to pretty much ignore best practices in order to make it easy for people to use, I realize web standards and best practices have a long way to go. Take the fact you can’t use Spry if you have to meet accessibility requirements – who thinks they shouldn’t make an effort to make their site accessble? Sure Microsoft, Adobe, and others have moved towards web standards with some stuff but the push of AJAX highlights the issue that people forget standards when it suits them…

I suppose its best to keep teaching myself more about web standards and best practices… and share ;)