December 18, 2007 11:08am
There's recently been a lot of noise about a return to the browser wars (Alex Russell, Jeff Croft, Stuart Langridge, James Bennett). The point being that standards take eons to complete and standards bodies aren't the right people to be inventing cool stuff for us to use on the web, it's us and the browser makers that should be creating the cool stuff for the standards bodies to codify. Ok, that all sounds great (albeit an incredible simplification of a multifaceted issue). So, let's go out and push that envelope.
In order for the future to be better by a large amount, it must be different by a large amount.
Of course Alex Russell's comment above is obviously true. There are plenty of people out there pushing boundaries, creating the future. The thing that concerns me is that there is a significant crowd of developers who use arguments against the cool-stuff-limiting effects of obsessive validation to dismiss validation completely.
"Hey, your web site is broken."
"Meh, read this."
"Um, but your site is broken in stupid, careless and lazy ways. You're not pushing any boundaries here, and you're damaging accessibility and the users' experience."
"Pfft."
December 19th, 2007 at 3:25pm
You know what? You're completely right. People will use the stuff Alex, Stuart, and I wrote as an excuse to dismiss standards completely, just like they've used Mike's much older post that way in the past. But you know what else? I really don't care.
That's those people's problem. They're being lazy and, quite frankly, not very smart. If they continue to build broken websites, they won't be in this game very long (Darwinism and all that). And I say, "Good Riddance."
December 21st, 2007 at 11:53am
I'd love to say good riddance too, but I don't have as much faith as you that they won't continue to get clients and continue to build crappily broken web sites (and, most importantly, not care that they're broken).
Sure, the tech stuff I follow is mostly high quality, but if you step outside that domain the proportion of crap escalates. A recent example for me was looking for a decent restaurant. Naturally I look online, and 100% of the sites were obviously broken in some way. Of course I didn't test the willingness of the design companies to fix the brokenness. And I'm sure the clients don't know any better. So they're going to keep hiring these people who don't give a shit.