Some of the developers at Opera have just released a curriculum titled: "Introduction to Web Standards". If you've ever wondered why web standards are important or how to implement them, they offer close to 50 articles explaining the ins and outs of the process.

I'm starting to think a linguistic model could be a lot more useful for this stuff. In linguistics, they have people called "prescriptivists" who are not widely respected, and whose prescriptions ("Never use the word ain't, never split an infinitive, never wear white after Labor Day") are promptly ignored. Then there are descriptivists, who study how language is used, and come up with advice for making sense of common, real world usage.

It's a little different, in that when it comes to human language, there's no real authority with the power to declare what's proper, and how language must be used. In theory, in HTML, the W3C is that authority. But the headaches people have dealing with the world's most common browser, and the non standard code the standards advocates are forced to write to accommodate it, make the W3C look like the French Academy.

I haven't read through their entire curriculum, but in skimming it, they do seem to be offering positive, real world examples of what should be done rather than what shouldn't. To summarize in a sentence, separate structure, style, and behavior for maintainability, device compatibility, and accessibility; use progressive enhancement when using JavaScript; and be aware of accessibility issues when choosing colors, font, and content type.

Unlearning bad habits might be a pain, but for me personally, having become aware of those issues, I haven't found standards to be that much of a hassle. My overall design probably benefits from the little extra thought I put in to make something standards compliant (though I think my current website needs a little love in that regard. I'll be redesigning it shortly.) The biggest problems are cross-browser CSS and JavaScript, but they both improve with practice and using a JavaScript framework certainly mitigates a lot of issues as well.

Do you think it's even valid, though, to say "You have to do X" and "You should never do Y" when they both work?

The point I've realized, is that as long as IE is the dominant browser, web standards are non standard.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

Do you think it's even valid, though, to say "You have to do X" and "You should never do Y" when they both work?

I think I would rather say, "X and Y both work, but X is a long-term solution that has more benefits than Y. Y is just a short-term fix. It may be a little quicker if you're not used to X and Y can work, but it does have certain drawbacks including some that could cause you some problems if you ever need to fix or change anything."

That said, I don't necessarily think it's right to force everyone to do everything the same way.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

The point I've realized, is that as long as IE is the dominant browser, web standards are non standard.

This is true, especially with IE6 still hovering around 20-25% usage. Once it's out of the way, I think we might see some significant steps forward. The biggest thing I'd like to see is for every browser to have an update system similar to Firefox. I haven't downloaded IE8 yet, so I'm not sure if it has that, but it's part of the reason IE6 is still around.

Still, even with the problems of IE6, I'm finding that if I follow standards and as I gain more familiarity with CSS, the browser fixes are very few and far between. Most of the time, I don't need to specifically target IE7 and when I target IE6, it's just a few little changes. Often simplicity in design helps. If something is getting way too complicated, it might be time to rethink your approach.