[thelist] clarify standards organizations? (was Re: Why code for standards)

Shirley Kaiser skaiser1 at skdesigns.com
Mon Feb 4 14:04:01 CST 2002


At 10:48 AM 2/4/2002, "Bev Corwin" <bev at enso-company.com> typed:
>The fact that small businesses are excluded from standards groups by the
>mere fact that the way the standards groups are organized and the price for
>membership is so high,  not to mention the prudish attitudes of many of the
>standards group leaders......makes a lot of the "standards" information,
>especially during the standards development process, unavailable to the
>smaller, independent, non - corporate sector professional groups.   If the
>standards groups were not so contentiously biased in favor of larger
>corporations in their standards development processes, as well as their
>various educational, conference and other development events, etc,  I
>believe you would find more small, independent businesses participate in
>these "standards" efforts.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding here, but I have a feeling this thread is
spinning off to other types of standards organizations rather than W3C,
which makes recommendations for the Web. No one needs to belong to a
standards group or organization to create standards-compliant Web sites,
and since others have been getting into IS0 registration, etc., perhaps
you're getting into that (which I know nothing about how they function).

Creating standards-compliant Web sites is not related to belonging to any
company, whether large, medium, small, or none.

I just want clarify that this thread is not about the topic of the original
inquiry, which was to help someone clarify reasons and get URLs to explain
to colleagues why it matters to code a CMS to be standards-compliant
(referring to the W3C recommendations and Web Standards).

>You claim there is a need,  and I agree with the
>general idea,  of the need for standards.  But in the case of most of the
>current standards organizations its more a problem of "how" things are done,
>that limit the wider acceptance and practice of these standard "ideals".
>Unfortunately,  the problems with standards organizations is that they are
>simply extensions of large corporations,  exclusive to independent
>contractors and small businesses.   By making your "standards" organization
>so exclusive,  how can you realistically ask such a question?  It is simple
>that the small businesses were / are "excluded" by these practices,
>therefore,  the question should be to them:  "Who would *want to* do that?"
>Why would they want to participate in the deployment of something that they
>were so obviously and prudishly excluded from in the first place?

Could you clarify which standards organizations you're referring to so that
the group doesn't misunderstand to what you're referring? I hate to have
heated posts about the W3C standards recommendations when you're talking
about other standards organizations.

Warmly,
Shirley
--
Shirley E. Kaiser, M.A.,  SKDesigns  mailto:skaiser1 at skdesigns.com
Web Site Design, Development     http://www.skdesigns.com/
WebsiteTips: Design Resources   http://www.websitetips.com/
Brainstorms and Raves  http://www.brainstormsandraves.com/


>----- Original Message -----
>From: <martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com>
>To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
>Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 10:00 AM
>Subject: Re: [thelist] Re: Why code for standards
>
> >
> > Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers
> >
> > -------------------- Start of message text --------------------
> >
> > Time for a bit of devil's advocacy:
> >
> > Why do we want to code for standards? Is it to avoid the
> > extra work involved in multiple sets of coding plus the
> > intelligence to serve the correct one?
> >
> > Now I can see the point of that in a booming economy when
> > we're all overloaded with work, but that's not the case anymore.
> >
> > Times are hard. We're short of work. We have to work our backsides
> > off to find it.
> >
> > So why are we turning away free work handed to us on a plate? And
> > more - there are a lot of people who *only* know standards (or one
> > browser). Knowing how to code round a lot of them is a competitive
> > advantage - sell it to your clients as a 'must have' requirement for a
> > professional, and you lock out your competitors.
> >
> > Who wouldn't do that?
> >
> > Cheers
> > Martin
>
> > Sent by:  thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> >
> > To:   thelist at lists.evolt.org
> > cc:
> >
> >
> > Subject:  Re: [thelist] Re: Why code for standards
> >
> >
> > > But in the end you code for browsers, not for
> > > standards (though the two increasingly overlap).
> >
> > But I think that's exactly it, we are tired of coding
> > for browsers. We want standards. We want to code for
> > standards.




More information about the thelist mailing list