For my money, a standardista in the web design arena is someone who will let nothing stand in the way of having perfectly compliant code. It should strictly validate as HTML (or XHTML). Any CSS files should also validate. If the customer wants or would benefit from a feature that can’t be accomplished in a standards-compliant manner, than the standardista will refuse to create it. Sort of flies in the face of the customer-is-always-right school of thought, doesn’t it?

Before dismissing this notion completely, though. It’s worth mentioning that the standardistas certainly have a point. How much easier would your world be if every browser treated your code exactly the same? That design Shangri-La would be infinitely easier to achieve if everyone wrote the same code. (I’m not saying we’d get there even at that point, I’m just saying it would be infinitely easier.) Trying to create a browser that correctly renders according to the current set of standards, remains backwards compatible, and stays within the development budget and time frame is a tall order. If the developers only had to focus on a narrow set of possibilities (say, valid code, for example) the process would be much faster. In truth, though, there are a lot of web sites out there that are not standards compliant. If a browser completely chokes whenever it comes across one of the many non-compliant sites, it wouldn’t be much fun to use. No one other than techies would want to use it.

And I don’t think the devout standardistas are asking for browsers to choke when they come across sites that don’t strictly adhere to the W3C’s recommendations. What they are looking for is that all browsers interpret valid code in strict accordance with the currently accepted standards. They can treat non-compliant code in whatever manner seems best to them. I have to admit, that would be enough to make me happy. Unfortunately it’s only realistic that economic concerns sometimes trump technically ideal software development. (That’s certainly how it works for my web sites, so I don’t see why browser development would be any different.) The standards battle may never be “won”.

I couldn’t in good conscience call myself a standardista, but I have picked up a few of the characteristics I would expect in one. I write my code in a text editor. I go to great lengths to avoid CSS hacks. I don’t do any inline styling. I take a few basic steps to keep my sites accessible to all types of visitors. Of course to a seasoned standardista, those are just some of the absolute minimum requirements to web design. Muffin Research Labs has a good article on outlining some of the best habits of a standartista. Although it’s over a year old, there’s some quality nuggets of wisdom that still hold up today.

filed under: Web Development