Return of the WaSP

No_Weak_Heart writes "After a brief hiatus, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) has returned. Here's the story at Wired about this grassroots coalition which works to promote the adoption of web standards by authors, tool makers and in browsers. In a related vein, the Boston Globe has a comfy chat with Tim Berners-Lee, the guiding force behind many of those standards."

Comments

Well yes .. but ...

[Mr_Silver]

The most popular browser in the world is pretty good at following the rules, the permutations of the Gecko engine (here are some: N M C) are all praiseworthy, and on top of that virtuous standards oatmeal is some pretty tasty rendering brown sugar; anti-aliased fonts are here to stay!

Well, yes, I don't think many people but the most hardcore of standards purists could claim that IE isn't pretty good at following the rules. Thats not the issue.

The issue is that it's not very good when the code doesn't follow the rules. The problem here is that IE "guesses" what you're trying to do.

This in itself isn't a bad thing and from an end user perspective is a damn good idea. If I go visit a site that someone has made a basic error then at least I can still view the content, their mistake doesn't prevent me from getting what i want.

The problem comes when people start getting used to writing sloppy HTML because it works on IE (yes, I made that mistake before I found the w3 validator and Opera) and when Microsoft products start producing sloppy HTML (Words and Powerpoint being two apparant examples, although I've not looked personally).

So yes, web-standards great idea. But there should be a standard on what to do with badly formed HTML too.

Re:I am not impressed

[skunkeh]

Your point is fine in theory, but you have to remember two things. Firstly, the vast majority of internet users don't even know that they can change their default font size (let alone how to do it). Secondly, the default font size on most browsers looks plain ugly. I would imagine that any users who want larger fonts have set their font size so that sites which use "font-size: small" are readable for them, as that will be a very common size for text on the web.

I imagine the Web Standards site design team had to make a tricky compromise, between the theoretically correct step of sticking to the default browser font size and the more design friendly choice of using "font-size: small". At the end of the day the point of the project is to convince designers that they should be using web standards, and as such it is important that the site looks good. Had they used the default font size I imagine many designers would have been put off the site by the ugly size of the text.

comments on Semantic Web

[MarkWatson]

I thought that the second half of the post (on Semantic Web) was interesting.

As someone who has spent lots of time in the last 5 years trying to automate extraction of information from the web, I welcome wider use of RDF (I have used it for years on my site) and separation of content and layout.

While the web as we know it is all about supporting human readers, the Semantic Web is all about supporting software agents.

-Mark

Re:I am not impressed

[jscribner]

And by Lion's share, we're talking 80%+. However, that doesn't mean web developers can say "it looks good in IE and OK in mozilla," so it's 'mostly-good' and thus sufficient. Pages need to be designed for the greatest possible accessibility and that includes all of the major browsers, earlier versions, and screen reader software (getting back to the 508 comment).

All too often i've been seeing trade-ins on design/coding_ease for standards compliance (particularly with fixed font sizes in css), better standards (WaSP) with more universal browser adherence to such standards.

Last comment (then i'll shaddap), the different browser interpretations of a particular piece of HTML has always been a problem and, though better, it is still an issue. Though this probably exists already, a good website identifying the differences on a case by case would be useful to the developer community. In addition, such a site could recommend lowest-common-denominator solutions and WaSP standards at the same time.

Re:Slashdot

[Lysander Luddite]

well...

Slashdot relies on tables for layout which is a big sin for WaSP. Not only do table-based layouts violate the structural markup that is the basis of HTML (and XML derivatives) it causes problems in browsers designed for the sight impaired (and therefore violates Section 508).

Slashdot also uses deprecated tags such as (font) and (b) rather than use CSS to change text presentation. I also don't see any structural flow such as using (H)eader tags to enable things like search bots to more accurately determine page content and weighted analysis.

So no, I would suspect Slashdot wouldn't stand up to WaSP scrutiny.

Standards and Reccomendations

[JamesOfTheDesert]

The W3C issues recommendations. They are not a standards organization, such as ISO, ECMA, or ANSI. Many companies, particularly those doing government business, are required to follow specs issued from standards bodies. HTML is OK, becasue of ISO/IEC 15445:1998(E). XHTML is not a standard; neither is XML, except as particular applications of SGML.

I tried creating a web page that used the ISO HTML DOCTYPE declaration:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "ISO/IEC 15445:1998//DTD HyperText Markup Language//EN">

The W3C validator page complained about it: Fatal Error: unrecognized {{DOCTYPE}}; unable to check document

It seems standards are not so standard.

Re:too bad...

[LinuxCumShot]

what is that little 'a' stand for? Or is it a backronym?