Raise Your Standards
By Molly E. Holzschlag
In the not-so-distant past, it was commonplace to use HTML hacks, workarounds, and proprietary tags and attributes to build sites. But hacks and workarounds just don't cut it with the current disparate state of operating systems, hardware, and browsers. We need detail, and we need an understanding of how markup really functions.
Most people authoring Web documents professionally first learned HTML as an extension of a job outside of communications technology. Many authors are in education, government, medicine, law, and general industry. These people perform Web authoring as a part of their weekly tasks, but not as a primary chore. Of course, there are many full-time Web builders, but the climate and the needs of those authoring professionally have undergone tremendous changes in recent years.
No matter which category you fit into, it's likely that you learned to author Web pages by the bootstrap method—using View Source, books, online resources, and help from friends and colleagues. That's an extremely effective way of learning if your object is to begin authoring pages ASAP. But while these early practices were certainly innovative, without a framework of literacy in authoring, they did little to facilitate interoperability or technological advancement.
No doubt you've heard the word standards bandied about, but there are some common misunderstandings regarding the definition of standards and how they apply to the Web author.
The Real Meaning of Standards
A standard is the result of a specific process.
