Better living through existing standards

I remember years and years ago when I first started working with web standards. I felt back then what I feel now – there’s good intentions but little activity except for a few initiatives. Zeldman, who I have the greatest respect for, calls it moving at a glacial pace.

There’s people like Molly trying to move the gigantic W3C boat, but it’s not really happening. There’s the HTML5 mess, there’s CSS drafts taking years, and there’s people getting confused and pissed – and rightfully so.

Luckily for web developers out there, the last few years brought something extremely valuable to the table – information. Developers at least understand what’s out there now, standards-wise and are making the best of that – one very clear example is microformats. The last couple of years have proven how resilient the development community is with exploring what’s out there now. We’re better living through current standards than sitting around waiting for the future to unfold.

Jeffrey Zeldman: One day, people from nice homes may forsake XHTML for HTML 5, making us wonder what that XHTML pony ride was all about anyway. Or not. If HTML 5 bombs, we’re not so badly off with the markup specifications we have. Remember this. It may help you sleep at night. If HTML, CSS, or accessibility go seriously astray (and depending on who you ask, at least two of these are in trouble), we will still be able to use HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, CSS1 and 2.1, ECMAScript, the DOM, and WCAG 1.0 (with our without reference to the samurai errata) when Britney has grandkids.

Jeffrey says there’s no such thing as a crisis in web standards, and although I agree, I sometimes secretly wish for a small revolution to actually happen – to stir things up a bit and remove the political cruft in the way. But there’s no such thing and for now we’re going to have to keep glueing what we have today in hopes of slowly building the future.