[thelist] Why code for standards

Ben Henick persist1 at io.com
Sun Feb 3 08:28:00 CST 2002


On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Shoshannah Forbes wrote:

> Anyone have by chance some good answers or URLs to give those people, in
> order to get them at least *consider* valid code as an option?
>
> If you try to use valid code in your project- why do you do so?

Well, short of anything on webstandards.org, I don't have anything solid
to give you in terms of URL's; the plusses of writing valid markup have
always been self-evident to me... hell, if you go ploughing through my old
stuff (that I wrote while I was a hanger-on in academia), you'll find
references to DOCTYPE declarations.  Now I regret not putting them in my
markup back in the day.

But I digress...

Think of it this way; if you'd told me five years ago that Netscape was
going to have a market share of approximately ten percent, I would've
asked to smoke outta /your/ Baggie.

Just as five years from now I may wistfully remember the days when IE had
the lion's share of the browsing market.  (Well, maybe not wistfully...)

Standards compliance is the most essential ingredient for:

- accessibility
- portability
- platform independence (which is really the amalgam of the preceding
  items)
- conversion to XML
- reusablity (think of libraries here)
- and of course forward compatibility.

If the market life of that CMS of theirs is less than, say, 24 months...
they may well be able to get away with nonstandard implementations.

However, if it's "built to last" then they should give some thought to
avoiding proprietary code & markup as much as possible.

With all of this said, I *can* appreciate why they would want to settle
for a proprietary approach... a CMS is after all a Web application, and
you generally want to write those for the smallest number of browsers
possible unless you're hooked to deep pockets...

...And meanwhile, a solid process can give a developer more freedom of
action in this regard.


--
Ben Henick
Web Author At-Large              Managing Editor
http://www.io.com/persist1/      http://www.digital-web.com/
persist1 at io.com                  bmh at digital-web.com
--
"Are you pondering what I'm pondering, Pinky?"
"I think so, Brain, but... (snort) no, no, it's too stupid."
"We will disguise ourselves as a cow."
"Oh!" (giggles) "That was it exactly!"




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