New Push for Standards Compliance

The Web Standards Project today released their new push for standards compliance in web browsing applications. In their press release they turn standards compliance into an exciting opportunity, envisioning a friendly “race to the finish” to be able to claim browser glory.

The article on Wikipedia has a brief background of the situation, along with some updated statistics and links to the respective software development groups involved in the effort.

This is all very exciting for those of us in the web design and development arena, because any standards compliance efforts that come to fruition make it easier, cleaner, cheaper, better, and more enjoyable for the end user. If you are new to the scene or just being introduced to the hidden technologies that make the web look and function, just know this: standards compliance means a level of consistency across browsers to ensure that any given bit of code looks, works, and provides a consistent user experience. Discrepancies in the way browsers are implemented require specialized workarounds to nudge in the direction of standards compliance. This takes more time and effort, and forces users to load more data into their browser that they may not have otherwise needed (causing slower page loads).

The worst offender in terms of compliance (and in popular use today), is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Released in the summer of 2001, this browser revision is rapidly approaching its seventh birthday. Being seven years of development behind is showing itself quite bluntly. More than half of the IE users have switched to the newer, faster seventh revision in the IE family. With talk of IE8 on the horizon, I fear that we’ll still be dealing with the issues of IE6 for a while longer.

If you are looking for a faster, safer, and more enjoyable web experience, switching to Firefox or upgrading to IE7 really make a big difference. Businesses have already had IE7 pushed to them as an important security update, but the home user - quite unfortunately - has not had IE7 automatically updated.

In this brand new era of standards compliance, if the visitors of our websites are not embracing the bastions of modern software, we are confined by the limited capabilities of outdated technology.