Hayo Bethlehem
Webstandards back in perspective
Sometimes you get the feeling all web standards discussion is getting a bit esoteric. XHTML versus HTML or Atom versus RSS discussions, for example are all great in the name of science, but let's hop back to the real world for a second.
Last week I published a website called Rijnwoude Digitaal. It contains virtually every website in the municipality with a .nl or other paid domain. Rijnwoude is a small municipality, it has only 18.883 inhabitants.
Still, I managed to find 182 websites. But here comes the sad bit. Only six of the websites adhere to web standards. Of those six, all are developed by my company Plerion. All remaining websites are hopeless frontpage, tag soup, frame contraptions, technically equivalent to 1996-era design.
Anne once mused whether we should continue to talk about web standards as such, as they are only W3c recommendations anyway. While he does have a point technically, sadly, If they were to rise above the academic goo, the web would probably be a better place. The World Wide Web consortium as a standards organization like ISO would make a lot of sense.
I think the fact that in one municipality, only 3%% of websites is 'standards'-compliant, says a lot about the current web-scape. If you extrapolate this, you could probably conclude that only about 6%% of Dutch websites have some resemblance to web standards.
Sometimes it's good to remember only 9%% of the American population knows about arcane technologies like RSS. There's still a lot of work to be done. The standards movement has to reach these lower, though mainstream levels (small business, non-profit, etcetera) before we can accept our practices as "everyone should know this by now".
– Hayo
Page last updated Sunday, July 25th 2010
Discussion
Arie 27 Jul 2005 Plerion! Rock on!
Tristan 27 Jul 2005 i don't think the standards movement has to ever reach the lower mainstream levels. the problem is that the people seem to think that although they require a mechanic to fix their car, they don't actually need a qualified developer to construct their website ("hey, it's cheaper if i get my son to do it, after all, he has a livejournal!" or something like that).
and although for the most part professional developers do an okay job (whether they adhere to standards or not), there are a few who just don't care at all, and produce utter crap anyway.
Hayo Bethlehem 27 Jul 2005 If the customers become aware of what defines quality in the webdesign trade, webdesigners will be forced to adapt. So if the top down approach doesn't work, maybe bottom up will.
Jon 18 Aug 2005 I think the big problem is that a lot of people do not care or do not know about the whole be valid html thing. A lot of "webmasters" are satisfied as long as the page looks ok in IE and Firefox.