This week on twitter Molly Holzschlag live tweeted the conversation with Bill Gates at Mix n’ Mash not that the twitter feed really had any important information in it. Anyway Molly did put the seemingly sanitised highlights of the conversation on her blog, thanks for pushing the points Molly.
The topic centred around Web Standards (recommendations for the purists) and IE8 development and the resultant loss of transparency that the development team used to have. Bet you have noticed that too, been very quite on the IE8 development news front hasn’t it (update: yes silence does usually mean we commonly think inaction even if MS says it isn’t sitting on its hands). So like us all Molly and others are smelling the old Microsoft rat.
I’ve noticed this over the last say 18 to 12 months, things are changing in the web community. There are still the usual arguments between people and various factional groups. That’s nothing new there. No it’s something more. It’s like a complacency, that we have all fought hard and that the war is over and we can live now in a golden age. The voices of leadership seem to be dropping away, not being as potent or vocal as they once where. Molly Holzschlag has seen it to, and again call people to arms, I seem to remember Molly doing this before recently.
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.
