Web-Standards
Now the promise of web-standards is being fulfilled. But it’s been a long time coming…
I always hand-code my websites…have done for years.
Back at the dawn of the consumer web it was impossible to make any of the design apps produce consistent results in both Netscape Navigator (I’m talking a loooonnnngg time ago) and Internet Explorer. So I made a strategic decision to write code to W3C prescribed standards and wait for the browser makers to see sense. I threw out table layouts and spacer gifs and frames and ‘best viewed in…’, split content from presentation, focused on writing semantic HTML and styled with CSS instead. Though I had to forego the dubious merits of proprietary features like blinking text (remember that?) the end result was code-efficient, accessible websites that looked nearly identical on different platforms.
Today, standards-compliant browsers are commonplace on desktops and mobile phones (see testiphone.com ). It’s satisfying to watch them finally catch up.