Web Standards Part II

Write to standards, not to browsers.

The reason for creating standards for the World Wide Web is for the browsers to follow uniformly, and, as mentioned in another rant, the browsers should follow the standard. Hopefully, they someday will, but until then many people are working around the browser and writing away from the standard. This is not helping! This just makes the browser companies write less to the standard. Thus I say, write to the standard and ignore the browser.

I know this will be tough, but logically it will work the same. This is because the current standards were created to fail gracefully and to use the latest accessibility principles. That is, a document correctly written to the HTML 4.0 strict standard will work not only on any web browser that supports HTML 4.0 strict, but even on browsers that only half support HTML 2.0.

Promote standards! Write all of your documents exactly to the standard, then test it, if only to check that you wrote it correctly. Or better yet, validate it against an official validator. Another way to promote web standards is to promote the Web Standards Project, using their banner images or just a text link. I have one available in the WWW standard format of the Portable Network Graphic for download.

Remember, accessible pages written to the standard work perfectly.

See also:
W3C
HTML 4.0 Strict
CSS2
DOM1
WAI
ECMAScript
WSP

Retrospective,

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Mike Burns <mike@mike-burns.com>