A conversation with Molly on Web Standards

I was for­tu­nate enough to spend an after­noon with Molly on her world tour to the edge of nowhere. We had lunch in a res­taur­ant over­look­ing the Swan River and talked. Took a ferry over the river and sat in a cafe/restaurant, talked includ­ing me try­ing to explain WA’s archaic licens­ing laws as we drank cof­fee, if we bought a meal it could of been beer . Before catch­ing the ferry back, wan­der­ing the street of Perth, see­ing some bronze kangaroos before find­ing a pub for a beer and even more con­ver­sa­tion. The pho­to­graphic proof is on Molly’s flickr account

We dis­cussed a wide range of top­ics, a couple of which need to reach a wider audience.

Microsoft and IE8

Microsoft is split into two divi­sions, Win­dows and Soft­ware Devel­op­ment, with even my lim­ited under­stand­ing of organ­isa­tional polit­ics, it became appar­ent to me why:

1. The Out­look team choose the inferior Office HTML ren­der­ing engine over the bet­ter IE HTML engine. Is so much easier to get the work done with teams with sim­ilar goals than nego­ti­ate with another team and their man­age­ment who have a dif­fer­ent agenda.
2. IE8 will only render in super stand­ards mode if a web page spe­cific­ally asks it to. This is a busi­ness decision that works for Win­dows, not for IE or any online ser­vices provided by Microsoft.

Web Standards

Molly’s cur­rent view on Web Stand­ards is more to with what stand­ards are accep­ted in the world out­side the web. We are talk­ing the Inter­na­tional Organ­iz­a­tion for Stand­ards aka ISO.

Which means if you are a web stand­ards developer you should be only cre­at­ing PDF-A doc­u­ments, because they are the only cur­rently recog­nised inter­na­tional stand­ard for web doc­u­ments. Everything else in just recom­mend­a­tions of the W3C, other than JavaS­cript which is covered by ECMA standard.

When WASP (Web Stand­ards Pro­ject) star­ted in 1998 (and I was too scared to get involved because I did not believe my skills were that good) some of the par­ti­cipants expec­ted formal stand­ards would come out of it, but 10 years later noth­ing has. Instead the moniker Web Stand­ards has been adop­ted by people to build web sites to W3C recom­mend­a­tions. ECMA script­ing which is a stand­ard rarely rates a men­tion in Web Stand­ards literature.

Get­ting real web stand­ards and I mean HTML, CSS and JavaS­cript accep­ted by as stand­ards by ISO will only bene­fit the web. Cur­rently only people in the web industry know about the w3c, most people have heard of ISO. Gov­ern­ments and cor­por­a­tions would like to get their web­sites built to an ISO stand­ard and would use ISO com­plaint browsers to read web pages. It would be bet­ter for the web industry, as it would require pro­fes­sion­als to built web­sites to ISO standards.

If PDF-A, JPEG JPEG2000 and Open Doc­u­ment Format can be ISO stand­ards then why not HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 5:04 pm and is filed under css and html . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.