[Am writing this post as a reply to the blog titled “Making Websites for ALL“, which was posted by Chamara, as a reply to the comment I made on a one of his blogs, titled “Web Standards Awareness Survey For Sri Lankans”.]

First of all I do appreciate your concern about Web standards and awareness about it among web developers (of Sri Lanka). Infact it is true, as you say Web standards are made for Accessibility, and Usability, which should allow internet to be accessed by every new mechanism that is invented to access internet in a standard way.

Anyway, what I meant on my comment as “cross-browser compatible” was compatibilty for as much web-enabled devices as possible, incase you got it wrong or I posted it wrong… I prefer to code using Notepad, rather than WSIWG editors. So I just prefer not to code Doctypes (even Google doesn’t), Namespaces …etc …etc (most of the time). Which are just code bloat (or time waste) according to me, am not just a web designer, I also have to spend time to add content to my sites. And I haven’t stepped into XHTML yet, which is a bit strict i suppose (and not supported by some high profile web browsers as i heard??). And should we code XHTML or HTML 5 in future? *confused.

Following are few of my Web development standards…

• Valid, efficient, clean, forward & backward compatible design & development
• HTML with non-deperecated elements & non-proprietary elements
• Valid (and efficient) CSS usage, with stylesheets
• (Error-free) Javascript usage (only when required)
• (Proper) Navigation
• Cross-browser compatibility, as much as possible (also includes browsers on web-enabled devices)
• Meaningful (and search-engine friendly) URLs
• And optionally - Usage of RSS feeds (for non-browser users), Tagging content and data, Rich applications and interactions(eg: Ajax), Multimedia platforms that could reach a wider audience(eg: Flv) …etc.

And I make sure webpages are rendered properly on Firefox, which makes sure it’d be rendered 100% accurately on IE , which is the browser used by 75% of visitors who visit my sites. I prefer atleast one Table for layouts, should use Divs with CSS in future, although not much a satifying option…

Although am not following Standards exactly according to the book, I always try to make sure my webpages are accessible by most web-enabled devices(used by the target audience ). And I have seen hits from devices such as PS3, Web TV, Mobile devices …etc (eg: ICS), on my Raw access logs (So I assume my websites are accessible by most Internet enabled devices).

As for the Accessibility and Usability part, Its a challenging topic to every developer, for which no one could achive 100% satisfying solution. But we should make sure our webpages are coded in a clean way. For an example use of CSS divides the content from formatting and designing elements of HTML on a webpage, which would make it possible to be read on devices like screen readers for blind people. And few other simple pratices like these would provide disabled people some amount of equality on the web. But it is impossible to make sites for ALL as you say , rather than text files

I guess browser wars would never end, as long as new web technologies are introduced. Agree or not, browser makers aren’t caring about standards, they just keep on modding their toys with some new gadget to bloat they are the king. This one of the reasons, why Web Standards Suck(this guy expresses this better than me, but on an XHTML page?? ).

“There is no true standard for anything on the web. It’s not possible to write a ‘valid’ XHTML document. Whining about invalid markup is whining. All extensions are valid. Microsoft wins. We all lose.”
- Jodawi

Even W3C chairman agrees…..

“The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn’t work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn’t complain.”
- Tim Berners Lee

So is it worth the trouble, developing for not-yet supported standards. Sad and bad, but most people think so. But there are some aspects of Web-Standards and related practices which could be used to create a cleaner web, for which I agree. Also some of these practices make sites optimized for Search engines, which is an added advantage. But some are just cosmetics (Gadgets for geeks??) expected to be supported in future.

And I guess and hope, In Web 3.0 era, every web accessible device might have the ability to manipulate web information in an equal standard way. For an example, try accessing a Web 2.0 site with a Opera Mobile browser on a Symbian mobile device (*no need to develop WAP sites anymore), it renders and allows to intract with pages exactly as in a PC. I hope these capabilities would be developed further for Web 3.0 and future devices would be capable of manipulating information better than ever.

Well, some parts of your post were jibberish and not related to webstandards AFAIK, But I learnt about some new technologies and terms thanks to you, Thanks

So my opinion is - if you make properly coded webpages, it isn’t a matter, if you do follow Standards (as they are defined) or not, as far as it does the job properly. As you say, it is….

A matter of targeting the target audience

link: True Colors by Dillistic

A short clip on the media, and some negative impacts it brings (anorexia etc.)
[No Copyright infringement intended]

says Dillistic, btw awesome clip

A cool online Photoshop resources site by my pal Aslam. Has a lot of content, and features a breathtaking futuristic design. Check out - http://photoshopfamily.com

At last R-tek and Sharfaz made it. Cool work.