Web Standards and growing pains

.. or is there no growth?

Molly Holzschlag has done it and again and yet again. She has raised a concern that has been brought up by others: "WTF are W3C and WHAT WG and HTML 5 WG up to? Are they completely from another planet? Are they disconnected from the real world end users and developers?"

Molly Holzschlag

Are you all just dumbed down by the fact you’ve got a job or what? Tell me. Let’s fix it. W3C, WaSP, whatever. We have problems.

Are there problems in this arena? Is it a bit of piled up frustration that has exploded? Or what?

Anyhow, the post triggered an enormous amount of comments and discussion (or at least poking at each other). Hence, follow up posts from Molly.

Plenty of storm

Reading most of the comments it mighht appear that there could be huge issues out there and that the world wide web is going to fall apart.

That sounds really, really awful.

In comes the King!

But then Jeffrey Zeldman puts me and hopefully all of us with our feet back on the ground with his post.

His point is that it is really easy to say that there is so much wrong with all the upcoming specs being compiled and coming out. But screaming murder without pointing out what exactly is wrong does nothing to help resolve the case.

That it takes long to compile specifications and have these in definitive state is something that makes sense. It's not making the menu for a Christmas dinner party with you and your parents. It's more like making a menu for a Christmas dinner for all your relatives. Each with their own diets and things they do not like to eat. And then also invite those Jewish people from across the street. And your Muslim colleague. And make sure everyone gets the right food prepared the right way and the right portion. Don't serve the Muslim wine, the Jew no ham, the vegetarian no meat at all. That is something like putting together a specification for HTML 5 is like, I guess.

Yes, it takes long to compile such a menu and I understand that the guests are getting hungry, but when it is finished each will have a great time and will experience a wonderful dinner and have their bellies filled with satisfaction.

It's not as bad as it seems

Molly in her third posts concludes in a way that's typical to her.

Molly Holzschlag

Is my approach passionate? You bet, and if you know me, it’s clear that the day that passion goes away I know I will have ceased to be effective in any way in this industry and I will leave it. But that day isn’t today. It’s a warm summer evening in Redmond, Washington, and I’m going to take some fresh lemons and make lemonade.
Anybody want a glass?

Roho

Well, it's clouded here so I will stick with a cup of cappucino.

Cheers, Molly!

Long live the King of Web Standards!

.. I bow to thee

It seems like so long ago already when I started to get into building web sites. Being the perfectionist that I am I wanted to do things right from the start. It was just a handful years ago that I really started building web sites. Although ky very first atempts must date back to 1995 or there abouts. I remember being proud of it and giving a colleague the url and him asking where the images were. Looking at the html I soon discovered they were still linking to my C-drive!

Well, years passed and I wasn't really active on the Net, other than trying to find stuff through AltaVista. Than five or six years ago I became more interested in web design and development again.

Being ambitious and working at Nike at that time "I wanted to do the right thing": and decided to just do it. I looked around for information and struck on sites like A List Apart and great inspring people like Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman. Through them and many other web standard evangelistas and web sites I learned the difficult trade of developing web standard compliant web sites.

And I am still learning today.

And I will still be learning tomorrow.

And I will probably still be learning for the rest of my life.

And I just love that

Back to the King

But do not stray too far from the path. Business Week has come up with a great article about Jeffrey Zeldman proclaiming him the King of Web Standards and rightfully so.

This is a must read and bookmark it and use it in the struggle to convince people of the need for web standards and the use of these.