my history with web standards
a random factoid
I had reason to troll through my archives recently, and found a note dated May 23, 2001 that was exclaiming my first redesign of my personal site using web standards & CSS-based layout. That’ll be five years this next spring.
Can the edge still be bleeding (so to speak) after five years?!
Also, I find it curious, but logical, that the only two trends I’ve ever been ahead of the curve on (CSS, blogging) happen to be so tightly intertwined.
I first ranted about semantic markup back around 1995, or whenever Netscape Navigator 2.0 came out, ten years ago. (Sadly, I missed the opportunity to title the rant “Font Tag Considered Harmful”….) Hasn’t a damned thing changed since then. I’ve done my share of personal evangelizing. I’ve tried to show people how using standard code and CSS makes their jobs easier. They say “cool!” then go back to creating nested tables. Sometimes I get so tired of the fight….
Oh yes, FONT was bad. But nothing, nothing, was as harmful as giving people BLINK.
We’ve had IE 6.x for five or six years now, and that’s left many of the problems we’re faced. I wish Microsoft would just drop support for a browser, so we don’t have to deal with them.
Ralph: I have had some luck on that front, but mostly with my assistants…and not just because I’m the boss.
Shelley: you know CSS has blink too, right?! And wouldn’t it be nice not to have to worry about a microsoft browser. (I did notice the other day that the library at work/school has the Firefox icon on the desktops of all their computers!