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Standards are a “good thing.” Not only do they provide guidelines that people can follow when they’re attempting to accomplish something, but they ensure that everyone is playing on level ground, and knows what to expect when their piece of work goes into play. Sure, sometimes standards get (unfortunately) disregarded, but for the most part, they are respected.

In particular, web standards are a very good thing. The Internet is a very open network, and as such, there are many, many different people accessing online resources with many, many different clients. If every client played by its own rules, we’d have a problem. However, standards solve this problem, by giving structure to developers (both of web applications, and of web user agents, or, browsers). But there exists one problem (one of many, no doubt, but still the one on which I intend to focus for now), lurking in the shadows and becoming ever more prevalent each day.

The standards are outdated.

The most commonly-accepted standards come from the prestigious standards body known as the W3C. For instance, just about every document worth viewing on the Internet is written in either HTML or XHTML, both of which are W3C standards. The current recommendation, XHTML 1.0, however, has not been updated since 2002. That’s five years. There is a working group currently developing the next set of standards to replace it, XHTML 2, and XHTML 1.1 was updated more recently, though it’s currently not a W3C Recommendation (it’s now a candidate). Five years isn’t much in a lifetime, but in Internet time, that’s ages.

Five years ago, web applications like those we use today didn’t exist. Ajax wasn’t used anywhere near as much, and the Internet was never really seen as a viable medium for rich applications. Oh, how that has changed. The problem is, the standards haven’t changed fast enough to catch up. While XHTML 2 does address some of the problems, it doesn’t cover all the bases. There is, however, an answer.

As web developers, we often forget that the W3C isn’t the only standards body out there, and that what they say isn’t automatically the “right way” of doing things. There exist many other bodies, like the IETF, which has given us the beautiful (and semi-popular) Atom syndication standard. But one of particular note that hasn’t received enough press of late is the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, or WHATWG. There is only one response that can come from any true web developer after taking a quick perusal of some of their standards:

… whoa

Some of the working drafts in development under the direction of the WHATWG, including Web Forms 2.0 and HTML5 (now a joint effort with the W3C HTML Working Group), are just absolutely phenomenal. They hit home much closer to what web application developers want, and make it easier to create rich user experiences that are easy to maintain.

So why isn’t everybody using them?

Well for one, they’re still working drafts, so it’s not time to implement them everywhere yet — note that I say “everywhere,” however. Many popular browsers (with the exception of Internet Explorer, for the most part — IE7 can handle a bit of the new stuff) already support a good deal of the exciting functionality, like the canvas element. Now is the time to at least begin implementation of the new standards.

Perhaps the largest reason that people aren’t using them, though, is that they’re not from the W3C. This mindset has got to change. You can use any standard at any time, as long as it’s a standard. Heck, most people don’t realize that they can actually extend any document written in XHTML with custom elements and attributes (and legally, within the boundaries of the XML standard)! It’s time to stop using the tools that everyone is used to, and start using the tools that make sense for each individual project.

Sure, it’ll be a bit of extra work. But won’t it be worth it?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 6:21pm by Matt Pat and is filed under The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.