Speaker: Molly E. Holzschlag

Concern about nomenclature: 

  • We really hurt ourselves when we called it “web standards” - it worked against us in hopes of selling to companies and organization.  
  • Instead of say “accessibility” say “universal design”.  It’s inclusive language.
  • Specifications and recommendations are not true standards.
  • We don’t have standards.  We are fighting for standardization.  

The original vision: 

  • The web is globally accessible (for any platform, any user agent, anyone)
  • The web is international (sites are global, local, in many and even multiple langues)
  • The web is meaningful, searchable, useful

Our Past: 

  • Began with a text based environment
  • Design was never an issue
  • Primary goal: to share information
  • Result: short lived, information-intensive, accessible web.

Presentational Web Design: 

  • By 1994, visual browsers are available
  • HTML tables are introduced (interestingly, CSS was first proposed in 1994, too)
  • Conventional, table-based rigid grid layouts
  • Slide n’ dice graphics, spacer gifs
  • Primary goal: Make sites look good
  • Result: Web grows but original vision becomes obscured

Organic Growth Syndrome: 

  • By 1998, sites had grown massively in scope
  • Increasing challenges in managing presentational HTML
  • Some use of CSS for fonts and color
  • Growing concern for accessibility, usability, and better information design
  • Primary goal: make sites work better
  • Result: time to refocus

Web Standards Project

  • WaSP emerged in 1998
  • Led by Zeldman and other advocates
  • Goal was to encourage browser developers to comply with W3C specifications
  • At that point in history, the issue was the DOM, not CSS compliance!
  • The term “web standards” was coined

Web Standards Movement

  • By 2000: Early adopters making shift to CSS-based layouts
  • Primary Goal: Clean up the web
  • Results: Improvements in technology, better educated developers and designers

Reformulate, refocus

  • Focus on clean, lean, mean, accessible (x)HTML
  • Use of CSS for almost all to all aspects of visual styling
  • Primary goal: Clean up the web even more
  • Results: Websites that look better, are more accessible, and more easily maintained

Contemporary web design

  • Focus on improving design both for and beyond the desktop
  • Use of meaningful markup, microformats, social software
  • By 2005: Major advances in the uses of CSS
  • Current: Return of JavaScript (DOM Scripting) and comination technologies (Ajax, JSON)
  • Primary goal: Stabilize practices and advance the web
  • Result: Reinvigorate technology

IE 8

  • Look for IE 8 readiness toolkit
  • The great irony is that it may be the first CSS 2.1 compliant browser that is widely used
  • Not going to have XHTML support

HTML 5 (what-wg)

 

  • Creating HTML 5 as an evolutionary markup that would facilitate contemporary web development
  • W3C gets on the bandwagon 

 

Flex, Silverlight, Ajax?

 

  • Talking about propietary platforms and the webapp
  • Coming into a challenging time: rush to innovation means we’re doing it on top of a foundation that’s not solid - we’re going to rush ahead of this complexity. 
  • We’re at a crossroads of the evolution of the web.