It’s back on the cards again, or maybe it never really went away. The need for certification of professionals in the web industry as a measurement that they are in fact compliant with using web standards in all there various variations of implementations. Late 2006 it was on the table, remember Mark Boulton had a go, and Richard Rutter had to comment on that, as you do. Well now PPK has put it all back on to the table with his proposal for the Guild of Front-End Programmers. There are some good points raised, but in the most part people are getting stuck on the detail, the micro level of the scheme, when there seems to be little concern for the macro level.
This post should really be called ten things that get up my nose. Many of these points will be old ground for some of you, take them as reminders. They are in the most part just annoyances that with a little work we can all avoid. I’m not totally dogmatic on this list, as in a realistic business world a I know that it is not always possible to do all these things when the economics of web development come into play. But in general we should at least be giving some consideration to these points.
Few weeks back at this months AWIA Mini Talks, An attendee (edit: name removed at request) brought up the argument that the web industry doesn’t really have standards at all. Well not standards in the traditional sense. It more has a series of guidelines that browser vendors have chosen to implement their way. He commented they need to stop and fix it before moving forward. Now I have been thinking on this for while, why not just freeze all the standards and get them all implemented correctly. Well Molly Holzschlag has been thinking this too. To the extent she suggests:
I’ll admit I have not taken a great deal of direct notice in the development of the HTML5 specification by the WHATWG. I have read over the specification from time to time, that’s about it. It’s not that I’m not interested; it’s been a question of resources and time. However with the W3C HTML working group announcing the opening up the process of the draft development process and the merging of their current effort with the HTML5 spec, this has brought the process back onto my radar again. Okay maybe a little belatedly, since this happened in late March (2007).
