Fantastic article that Charl sent through to me today that ALL web designers and developers should read so they get an informed idea of both how the industry works and the reasoning behind the decisions from the web giants - Martian Headsets - Joel On Software.

Quote the article:

The consumer is not an idiot. She’s your wife. So stop laughing. 98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites.
So you see, we have a terrific example here of a gigantic rift between two camps.

The web standards camp seems kind of Trotskyist. You’d think they’re the left wing, but if you happened to make a website that claims to conform to web standards but doesn’t, the idealists turn into Joe Arpaio, America’s Toughest Sheriff. “YOU MADE A MISTAKE AND YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BREAK. I don’t care if 80% of your websites stop working. I’ll put you all in jail, where you will wear pink pajamas and eat 15 cent sandwiches and work on a chain gang. And I don’t care if the whole county is in jail. The law is the law.”

On the other hand, we have the pragmatic, touchy feely, warm and fuzzy engineering types. “Can’t we just default to IE7 mode? One line of code … Zip! Solved!”

Without the standards Nazis the web would still be as it was in the 90s - but they also need to understand that the web for the most part is by the people for the people and nobody will get any traction with breaking the web for the sake of “cleaning it up”. *IF* the browsers decided to be strict with standards by default - all that would happen is the average user would download the new browser, test their favourite sites, see it all broken - and BLAME THE BROWSER; not the site - for the resulting ugliness. At which point they would revert to their old browser and the standardists would be back to square one.

The only way to approach this from both sides is transitionally. Provide a token for standardists who want full features to enable them for their sites and default to non-standards for all other sites. Whilst standardists might not like this approach - it will give them the full featureset without breaking the web; and they will find that EVENTUALLY more and more developers and designers will get sick of not working with standards and create all new sites with this standards friendly approach. Once the overwhelming majority of sites (at least all the popular ones) have been written this way the default behavior can be at this point switched without the average joe wondering why the majority of sites they visit on a day to day basis all of a sudden dont work with the new browser.

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