I read the print version of this Australian Personal Computer article a couple of weeks ago when it was first published: The World Wide Web is Not Enough. The accompanying web site is a few weeks behind the paper version, and I’ve been waiting for the article to appear so I could comment on it. Hanging out for it to appear, actually. And now it has.
Really, the subtitle or whatever you call it should really give it away:
Web standards. They’re big, dumb, and they don’t work. Yet, they persist. Why?
It’s written by someone who just doesn’t get it.
It was suggested on the Port-80 forums where I while away far too many hours of my time that the author was a “dipshit”. I am of the opinion that this is not true. He’s a published author, he’s obviously got a lot of knowledge and experience. I think he’s just stuck in the past, unwilling to admit that things have moved on. A dinosaur, if you will.
Here’s what I think David Emberton and anyone who agrees with his column should do: read Roger Johansson’s Developing With Web Standards: Recommendations and best practices, and Bobby van der Sluis’s The learning curve of web standards. Between them, everything that you need to know to get started with web standards, why you should bother, and how not to be a dinosaur.