[thelist] What does standard compliance actually mean?

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 15:20 +0200, Andreas Wahlin wrote:
> To many, standard compliance seem to mean stuff like "semantic web"  
> and sometimes even "unobtrusive scripting/graceful degradation". But  
> doesen't standard compliance just mean that you follow your declared  
> doctype and validate against the w3c validator, not that I  
> automaticly write insanely great webpages (from a code view)?

Yes, some people use the term "standards compliant" to mean more than
strictly what it is supposed to mean. I, personally, try not to, though
standards compliance and accessibility have a lot of common ground.

Standards compliance is the first step of many to make a great site, but
there are still people out there that still (quite mistakenly) think it
implies pages that are black on white with blue links and purple visited
links. It's not the only step, but the way I see it, if one shows enough
disregard of standards, I would go as far as to say one no longer has
made a Web site.

Without standards, we would not have a World Wide Web, or for that
matter, an Internet. It's easy to forget this and do just what Browser X
(on hardware architecture Y and operating system Z, etc) lets you get
away with; few people realize just how grave of a mistake this can be.

(Sidenote: I have seen the term "graceful degradation" falling out of
favor, replaced with "graceful transformation".)

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>