Andy Rutledge wrote this post about web standards that I thought was a pretty good description of the “why” behind standards. He says that web standards are not being marketed properly; that it’s not about compliance, but about quality. He says:
The general public does not care about Web standards any more than it cares about the minutiae of standards for aircraft hydraulics. The airplane just better damn work right. So the general public does care about product quality, and companies or craftspeople that are known to produce low quality products are not well regarded, and for good reason. Standards are for organizations to sort out amongst themselves for their own edification. Quality is what matters in the end. Quality is what matters to those who have to interact with products.
He makes the point that W3C and the Web Standards Project have done a poor job selling web standards to the design community at large to whom “standards” come across as “arbitrary rules”. Well, Andy actually works in a web design firm with other designers, so he may have contact with a lot of designers that are bucking the standards trend “just because”. However, as someone that has only gotten a grasp of how to do web design over the last several years, I know that from the moment I read about web standards, I wanted to adopt them. Why? Because I wanted to design web sites right. It was never a mystery to me that it is about quality that had multiple benefits to the user, the site owner, and the world at large. Perhaps a large part of the credit goes to the Academy of Web Design, where I was taking classes, which introduced good reasoning for standards early on. I must admit that as I went online in search of more information, though, I found the same overarching “quality” arguments that Andy makes in his post made again and again by others, if not in those exact words.
In fact, the challenge for me has been to some up with a way to express the difference that abiding to web standards makes to customers. How do I explain that what I do is different than what a web designer that doesn’t care about web standards does? The following is part of my attempt to explain this difference in a very generalized way from my business site:
Beauty is more than skin deep
What if you brought home a beautiful new Ferrari, only to pop the hood and find the engine put together with rubber bands and duct tape? Unfortunately, this is the way many web sites are built: slick and shiny on the outside and a tangled mess of code “under the hood”.
And messy code is, in the long run, expensive.
* It is expensive to maintain.
* It is expensive to change.
* It is expensive in terms of server resources.
* It is expensive when it costs you customers as the web site or web application “breaks” and loses functionality.
and
Beautiful code
…has the following qualities:
* It validates.
* It is accessible.
* It renders the similarly across browsers.
* Content and style are kept seperate.
* It is written in semantic markup.
* It is easy for another developer to read and edit.
Using web standards makes the above possible, even if I don’t mention them specifically.
I’m not sure if the marketing message for web standards really does need improvement vis-a-vis designers in general. I was sold from the very beginning. But when communicating to clients about what I have worked so hard to learn, talking about web quality as opposed to web standards is a very smart move to make. As Andy says, “professionalism and quality products are hard to argue against”.
It’s about quality, stupid
Andy Rutledge wrote this post about web standards that I thought was a pretty good description of the “why” behind standards. He says that web standards are not being marketed properly; that it’s not about compliance, but about quality. He says:
He makes the point that W3C and the Web Standards Project have done a poor job selling web standards to the design community at large to whom “standards” come across as “arbitrary rules”. Well, Andy actually works in a web design firm with other designers, so he may have contact with a lot of designers that are bucking the standards trend “just because”. However, as someone that has only gotten a grasp of how to do web design over the last several years, I know that from the moment I read about web standards, I wanted to adopt them. Why? Because I wanted to design web sites right. It was never a mystery to me that it is about quality that had multiple benefits to the user, the site owner, and the world at large. Perhaps a large part of the credit goes to the Academy of Web Design, where I was taking classes, which introduced good reasoning for standards early on. I must admit that as I went online in search of more information, though, I found the same overarching “quality” arguments that Andy makes in his post made again and again by others, if not in those exact words.
In fact, the challenge for me has been to some up with a way to express the difference that abiding to web standards makes to customers. How do I explain that what I do is different than what a web designer that doesn’t care about web standards does? The following is part of my attempt to explain this difference in a very generalized way from my business site:
and
Using web standards makes the above possible, even if I don’t mention them specifically.
I’m not sure if the marketing message for web standards really does need improvement vis-a-vis designers in general. I was sold from the very beginning. But when communicating to clients about what I have worked so hard to learn, talking about web quality as opposed to web standards is a very smart move to make. As Andy says, “professionalism and quality products are hard to argue against”.