Slash your Web budget: Read the manual
Tuesday, August 6th, 2002Web Standards for Hard Times is a return to the sort of hands-on articles I wrote for Webmonkey in the old days, but this time with a lot of help from new friends at the Web Standards Project and professional consultants. The article lists three simple steps for cutting site maintenance costs by incorporating the same standards Microsoft and Netscape have built into their browsers over the last few years.
Of course, one of the Web’s best features is that you don’t have to get every byte of HTML exactly conformant to a complex protocol in order to publish a page. You can learn the tech as you go, or not at all. I hope that never changes.
But Web developers who’ve adopted the W3C standards that seemed so pedantic and sleep-inducing in 1997 told me they’re finding a big payback today: As 20th-century browsers with their irrational, incompatible behavior become extinct, coding to standards means no longer having to test, tweak, and redesign pages to different rules for different desktops. That old grind eats as much as ten hours per week for some of the pros I talked to.
This article may be a bit of subconscious atonement for having helped Netscape and Microsoft push their competing HTML extensions five years ago. I eagerly produced high-profile demos for both sides in the browser war of ‘97. What can I say; it was fun at the time.
