Entry tags:

Web standards wank!
SCENE

A small coffee shop in San Francisco, lit by tasteful lamps and the glow of a dozen laptops. At one table sits Jeffrey Zeldman in his trademark blue beanie, musing at an article about adaptive web design. Across the shop sits Paul Irish, reading code commits and updating his blog. People linger around them, slowly absorbing knowledge of how to build a better-designed website and contemplating how to dispose of Internet Explorer 6 forever.

IRISH: We gather here today to launch Move the Web Forward, to advance our community and elevate the web platform.

The crowd oohs.

IRISH: I thank all of you who contributed—especially Dimitri, whose twittered words gave this project life, my co-conspirator Divya, and Mat, who put his blood and tears into this project.

There is a round of appreciative back-slaps and toasts.

IRISH: We're launching on Blue Beanie Day, the day of celebrating web standards. I am sad to say that Jeffrey Zeldman, whose blue beanie we all admire, didn't mention anything about us at all in his eulogy of blue beanie merchandise.

Crowd boos.

ZELDMAN: (gets up) I talked about this project all over the place, despite the ill-written website that lacked information on who was behind it. I cannot believe you would sink to this kind of whiny character assassination. You did the same thing with my magazine when we've reached out to you again and again. I suppose you must have a grudge against me. F— off.

DIVYA MANION: Please stop the drama. Drama is not a part of web standards.

BYSTANDER: We barely survived the browser wars, please don't start a web standards war. Ian Hickson is already about to start web standards war!

IRISH: Actually, you didn't link to Move the Web Forward. At all. Please stop using such negative language.

BYSTANDER 2: I have the internet! And the internet says you only posted this to Facebook! Not to Twitter or Google the Plus!

MANION: The web has been rotting, stagnant for a decade. What has anyone else managed to do? We're going to change that.

ZELDMAN: Paul, I've reached out to you again and again, and you just continue publicly trash-talking me. Whatever. Let's steer clear of each other but don't bring me up in your blog again. Also Divya, I totally like like this project but, seriously, I hate Paul.

A man enters the coffeeshop. Close inspection reveals him to be Jonathan Hoefler, purveyor of fonts.

HOEFLER: (tugs down his scarf) In the screenplay version of this conversation, we'd now answer the knock at the door to find a smiling, hapless fellow distributing religious pamphlets. He'd say something conciliatory and serene, and we'd yell at him to fuck off, slamming the door. Then we'd take stock of the situation, and share a good belly laugh.

Hoefler buys a coffee, and exits the shop.

BYSTANDER 3: Are we internet famous yet?

COFFEESHOP OWNER: We're closed.

*

Background: Jeffrey Zeldman co-founded the Web Standards Project and A List Apart, an online magazine about web development that is now publishing books and hosting conferences. Paul Irish co-created HTML5 Boilerplate, the new web development playground tool; contributes to jQuery, on most reputable websites and many ill-reputable ones; and works for Google. Jonathan Hoefler is responsible for many famous fonts.

Discussion paraphrased from Paul Irish's blog. Twitter has been replete with head-shaking and popcorn gifs.

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	lilitu93 2011-12-08 01:33 pm UTC (link)
	Great write-up! So much wank in the web dev and design communities, but it rarely gets publicised outside of them. I used to be a front end developer but haven't coded professionally for like 5 years, so it's both funny and depressing to still see people having to fight for standards and that IE 6 still isn't dead. (Reply to this)(Thread)

adevyish
2011-12-08 07:22 pm UTC (link)

Thank you!

Facebook and Google both gave up on IE 6, but any version of IE (except perhaps IE 10, for now) is as much of a headache. The standards fight is more like this clique-ish food fight than standards vs the masses, sadly. Just a few months ago Ian Hickson, the editor of the de facto HTML5 spec (everyone decided the W3C process was too slow), removed the <time> tag, causing everyone else to go "wtf?"

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lilitu93
2011-12-08 08:25 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, I remember every version of IE being horrible, just none so bad as IE 6. I once had to recode a site that had been built with no tables and CSS that was supposed to follow standards but had really been tested only in IE. Horrific!

I don't miss front-end coding professionally (went into IA/UX a few years ago), but it's kind of reassuring to see how some things never change. There always were cliques in the standards vs tables crowd, and now that standards pretty much won the fight on the professional level (for the most part at least and applied in a real-world kind of way), it's not surprising it's gotten even more cliquish.

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	adevyish 2011-12-09 05:52 am UTC (link)
	How do you build a standards-compliant site on IE? I'm having enough fun with CSS vendor prefixes as it is. Quite thankful for the creation of jQuery/Prototype/etc so I don't have to worry about IE differences for event handling. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

lilitu93
2011-12-09 12:02 pm UTC (link)

Yeah, I boggled at that too. But I was the first front-end person they'd hired - they'd let the back-end devs do it before, and they were the type that thought because front end is "easier" that anyone can do it and you don't have to actually work at it.

My skills have deteriorated so much - I used to be able to hand code, and now I've forgotten how to clear floats. If I ever get back into HTML prototyping, I do need to pick up jQuery (though I'd be more likely to use Axure now, just because you can't expect everyone to code).

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adevyish
2011-12-10 05:38 am UTC (link)

Oh man people who think front-end is easy make me :|

Also there was some real unfunny today with Divya - she'd said some article was "bullshit" and people dogpiled her like woah, while others who called one of her articles bullshit were let go easy. It's not ~proper~ for an Opera dev relations team member to say stuff like that, apparently, but I can't help but smell gender discrimination there.

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	eleutheria 2011-12-08 08:31 pm UTC (link)
	I wish someone would please tell my client that 6 should die, since the only thing the web login for their server recognizes is IE 6 and 7. I keep 6 around solely to login to do my work, and then I drop the page and go back in through Firefox-- which runs the production site just fine, but isn't recognized for login. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lilitu93 2011-12-08 08:41 pm UTC (link)
	Unfortunately it's still used in corporate environments. It's hard to believe that anyone is still using a decade-old browser, but you can blame Microsoft for that. And corporations for never wanting to update their IT policy and building things for a specific browser in the first place. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	sukeban 2011-12-09 08:58 am UTC (link)
	I know your pain. When I was finishing college ten years ago I had an internship job at a savings bank. I convinced them to upgrade from old-timey Visual Basic to Delphi, but when I had to hand-code a PHP frontend for a stocks query minisite I had to take into account that the operators still used 600px wide monitors. (Reply to this)(Parent)

demonbean
2011-12-10 01:36 pm UTC (link)

So, this week google did indeed finally give up on trying to make gmail run on IE6. There's this nice, snarky little message at the top about, "please try to get a modern browser," which would be just delightful... except that we are expressly forbidden from installing any other software on our computers, and there are good reasons as to why. So, perversely, I'm a bit annoyed at google - I'm now locked for the rest of ever, at work, into a version that won't auto-update or let me use, say, italics.

#firstworldproblems

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	tinmiss 2011-12-11 07:13 am UTC (link)
	My work uses it, and we're forbidden/blocked from everything else. And...every business-related job I've had has been the same. And we have to use outlook. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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