Statement on Web Standards

The web is an evolving medium. Most of the time, that is a good thing. Freedom of information, ease of publishing, all that stuff makes the web a very good thing. Just as the web has grown rather organically, so have the browsers we all use to navigate it. That is not as good.

Up until recently, browsers were built on code that was written before the web really took off, before people started trying to make web sites for anything other than academic papers. As a result, they got very sloppy very fast. Web developers are initimately familar with this phenomenon, but everyone else has seen it too: web sites that don't behave the way you think they're supposed to, sites that only support one browser, sites that are inaccessible entirely to the visually or otherwise handicapped.

One major step toward solving these problems has already happened. Browser manufacturers have all released browsers that behave almost exactly the same way in terms of the web pages they display. They've created browsers which do their layout according to standards set forth by the WWW Consortium. Until now, those standards have been largely ignored, and we've all been dealing with sites and pages that either just don't work, or are slow to display, or both.

So, why have I messed up the pages? I want to experiment with building web pages that comply with the letter and the spirit of the standards. In doing so, many things are gained:

• My site will look good in any modern browser with little or no browser-specific modifications. Trust me, when Netscape and Internet Explorer 4 were the big dogs, this was a huge pain in the neck.
• Because I don't have to do anything special to make my pages look good, if you have an old browser that doesn't do style sheets; a text-based browser; a PalmPilot, cellphone, or other mobile internet device; or if you're blind, this web site will make logical sense. There isn't any weird stuff getting in your way. In terms of catch phrases, the content and the presentation (how it looks) are almost entirely independent. Yay!
• The pages load faster because there's no extraneous crap necessary.

The upshot of all this is that this site is probably going to look like crap if you're using Netscape or IE 4. My friends page, in particular, will not work if you're using one of those browsers. In order to experience some features of this site fully, you'll need to upgrade. I'm not asking this just for me, but for the future of the web. If the browser makers discover that yes, this is important to people, they'll keep it up (and fix the bugs that still plague them).

So, if you're ready to do it, here's what I recommend:

• Internet Explorer 5 or greater (all platforms)
• Netscape 6.01 or greater (all platforms)
• Opera 4 (all platforms)
• Mozilla, which is the project on which Netscape 6 is based (all platforms)

All of these browsers can be found in the Evolt browser repository.

If this a topic that interests you, you can read more here:

• The Upgrade Campaign at The Web Standards Project
• To Hell With Bad Browsers! on A List Apart

For now, the big benefits are for the designers. However, if we have more time to think about designing instead of trying to figure out why this page looks right in that browser but not in that one, everyone wins. And if you lasted this long, I'm impressed. Thanks.