Web Standards - Part I
Several years ago I attended the computer show at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. One of the featured speakers was Jeffrey Zeldman, who has been designing web sites since 1995. Mr. Zeldman is the publisher and creative director of A List Apart (www.alistapart.com), an online magazine for web designers. He and Eric Meyer, the stylesheets guru, founded An Event Apart, a conference on standards-based design. An Event Apart held its last show of 2006 in Austin on September 27. In 1998 Zeldman cofounded the Web Standards Project. Molly Holzschlag is now the de facto leader of the Web Standards Project.
I am going to do a professional development project on web standards, so naturally I bought Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition (New Riders: Berkeley, 2007). This post is a brief introduction to web standards, focusing on what they are and why they are needed. Other postings will explore the subject in much more detail.
Only a few years ago there were no consistent standards for websites. A site that displayed correctly in Internet Explorer would not display properly in Netscape Navigator, and vice versa. Netscape JavaScript would not run in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft developed its own version and called it JScript. JScript would not run correctly in the Netscape browser. Web designers had to spend lots of time and tons of their clients' money developing separate versions of the sites they built so they would run in both browsers.
This is why Jeffrey Zeldman and a few other designers founded the Web Standards Project. The web standards this group, the World Wide Web Consortium, and all the major browsers now support are: XHTML, XML, CSS, ECMAScript (standardized JavaScript), and the DOM (Document Object Model). Other posts will examine each of these technologies in depth and explain why all web designers should follow them.
Resources:
Jeffrey Zeldman's home page - www.zeldman.com
The Web Standards Project - www.webstandards.org
Happy Cog - www.happycog.com
A List Apart - www.alistapart.com
An Event Apart - www.aneventapart.com
Eric Meyer's home page - www.meyerweb.com
Molly Holzschlag's home page - www.molly.com
Wikipedia article on Web Standards
I am going to do a professional development project on web standards, so naturally I bought Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition (New Riders: Berkeley, 2007). This post is a brief introduction to web standards, focusing on what they are and why they are needed. Other postings will explore the subject in much more detail.
Only a few years ago there were no consistent standards for websites. A site that displayed correctly in Internet Explorer would not display properly in Netscape Navigator, and vice versa. Netscape JavaScript would not run in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft developed its own version and called it JScript. JScript would not run correctly in the Netscape browser. Web designers had to spend lots of time and tons of their clients' money developing separate versions of the sites they built so they would run in both browsers.
This is why Jeffrey Zeldman and a few other designers founded the Web Standards Project. The web standards this group, the World Wide Web Consortium, and all the major browsers now support are: XHTML, XML, CSS, ECMAScript (standardized JavaScript), and the DOM (Document Object Model). Other posts will examine each of these technologies in depth and explain why all web designers should follow them.
Resources:
Jeffrey Zeldman's home page - www.zeldman.com
The Web Standards Project - www.webstandards.org
Happy Cog - www.happycog.com
A List Apart - www.alistapart.com
An Event Apart - www.aneventapart.com
Eric Meyer's home page - www.meyerweb.com
Molly Holzschlag's home page - www.molly.com
Wikipedia article on Web Standards
posted by Jimmy in the Hills | Saturday, September 30, 2006
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