James Little @ NZfusion.com

And the longest blog post I have ever read. Actually there is a very lengthy description of what standards are good for and why it is a good idea to have them well thought out ahead of the game.

It has been unfortunate for people developing web applications that standards have been so far behind the industry for so long. It is changing now, with more organizations dedicating professionals to sit on the committees. It isn’t that I think the committees originally did a bad job, it’s just that nobody really had the foresight to get involved in these things and make sure the standards existed before the web browsers were launched with the features.

Joel believes that standards adherence will reduce development costs; that simply isn’t true. We will still have to test our web applications on the platforms we expect it to run; even though the browser/platform attempts to follow the standards, it doesn’t mean it will always succeed. We are human… and the most popular web interface tomorrow could be a Java screen reader for your iPhone… you’d want to see how it works - it probably won’t be what you imagined.

I support open standards, it is a pain developing when you are adding code for known defects in the browsers. The browsers must support standards, but unfortunately it isn’t going to reduce that much work for developers - most of the eccentricities are well documented. Standards or not, there will still be defects.