Why it’s important for browser vendors to support Web standards?
Published June 20th, 2007 11:02 AM EDT By Daniel GoldmanDavid Berlind’s ZDNet blog post titled “Tragedy: Commercial developer reports 35% of coding time spent on IE/Firefox incompatibilities” highlights the importance for web browser vendors to support Web standards.
Why should your code render and work differently depending on the browser of your choice? As a web developer myself, who’s has spent countless hours and days dealing with many browser incompatibility issues, I see Web standards as a necessary and urgent solution. Web standards add to productivity, and as a result developers have more time to focus on boosting Web innovation.
In an era where the web is increasingly moving outside of the PC to mobile phones, TVs, consumer electronics, gaming consoles, and anywhere else you could possibly imagine, web standards are the only way the keep the web sane and out of chaos.
When Apple released Safari for Windows, part of me was happy. Like Opera, Safari is well known for its commitment to Web standards. Having Safari on Windows, the OS of choice for many web developers, would encourage developers, and more importantly browser vendors, to support standards. Wishful thinking…
Let’s bring an end to the quirks and hacks.
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed.
using
Are these really news? An article based on a single developer experience?
It’s always good to see the “develop for web standards” message but backing such a message with a single developer experience doesn’t help. I find it a lazy article. Berlind, could have quoted some other study, article or statitics.
using
Agreed.
This is also why we need to get as many people as possible away from Internet Exploder. Even if they choose FF, or Konqueror (where’s my windows version already!?!), at least they support standards. I’venever been able to figure out why sires whould purposely build mobile versions (digg, I’m looking at you) when the regular versions work just fine in opera mini.
The less market share IE has,
the more web standards will be followed,
the easier life is for web devs,
the more they can focus on cool stuff instead of compatibility.
/rant over
using
Percy, even though David didn’t include stories and usecases from multiple developers, many developers can relate to the article. We see this all the time when new services and web applications are released with support for only a select few of the top browsers, which clearly shows the need for standards.
using
Amen to that…standards could make my life so much easier.
using
Daniel, I am not saying the message is not true I’m completely convinced it is. The thing is the message is for developers who don’t currently relate to the problem because they think the web is an IE playground. It takes more than “this man over here is working 50% extra because of poor web standards support” to convince them..
No one needs to convince a caring/suffering web developer of this.
using
Percy, fair enough.
using
So agreed. I myself have always been developing sites following the web standard guidelines as well as I can.
Currently I am using XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.1 in my web projects and PNG as image format. I don’t try to do all kinds of weird hacks or use JavaScript for “cool” things. In my opinion simple, well structured and standards compliant web pages are what every site should strive for.
And it is not enough to get the page say it is Valid XHTML or whatever if the inner structure is not logical. There are heading tags from h1 to h6 for a reason, as an example. I have seen some sites that use just div and span tags to structurize the page. Yes, they still validate but are not following the real purpose of (X)HTML.
Let’s just hope that more sites will move on to not use all these hacks. Personally I have a bad feeling of all this Web 2.0 hype with AJAX used everywhere.
using
Hm, strange, but today I wrote a bit similar article in my blog also “Short Information for Web Developers”.
Big minds thinks same
using
I don’t do much web design (and my site uses a template designed by someone else), but I understand the headache of trying to design around browser quirks. I normally don’t try to do anything advanced with CSS because I don’t want to take the time to code around bugs in IE and Geko.
The one that annoys me the most is the blue border that both IE and Geko based browsers draw around linked images. It’s easy to stop, but incredibly annoying…
using
The key word here is ZDNET … always firmly in the IE camp, and MS is the reason.. they make a browser so ‘loose’ that any idiot can make a bit of web-code, and it will not give any errors..
It goes higher up, where webdevs use the ‘ie-standards’ just to do ‘cool things’….
and then their ‘work of art’ is tried on a better browser, and of course it breaks…
As GT500 says, keep keep it simple and standard, and will work in most cases…
using
happy birthday, dan… any chance of getting a good ‘edit mode’ for this blog?? (it would help my mistrakes!!
)
using
illiad, I’ll look into providing an optional registration for those wanting to edit comments and bypass the moderation.
using
:up: :up: thanks!!
a good example is used by theregister.co.uk 
using
Hey happy birth day Dan. I realy appreciate this upload.
using
a good point about ‘browser standards’ here…
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/findpost.pl?id=2110951
using
Hmmm let me have a look at it.
using
Daniel, I love the idea of being able to register for your blog so that I can edit my own comments, and not get squashed by the spam filter. That would be great.
using
looks like its forgotten…