Standards. My mother always said I should get me some of those. I think I did right by her. And by doing right I mean I don’t copulate with livestock or poultry, and I haven’t killed anyone.

So far.

That I know of.

Gotta start small, right?

Much has been said about standards in web development. Ever since the advent of the orange book, they’ve become a kind of panacea to the untamed, frightful illness that is Web Development Hell.

So, have they lived up to the hype? Are we developing better, faster, easier to maintain websites by subscribing to the church of the w3c?

Yes.

And No.

For a number of reasons, Web development is still far from being a field where you can achieve a great user experience if you follow standards to the letter.

Standards are not the end-all be-all of web methodologies. For years, people have been hacking together ugly, daunting, proprietary, but perfectly functional code. Hear the reasons and learn the tricks from the renegade side of the fence.”

This is what our panel is about. There are great people in it. Glenda, who has a confession to make (and whose open source boyfriend emphatically disapproves of this whole endeavour, btw), Kevin Gibbs, who brought us Google suggest, and more recently, Gmail Talk, Aaron Boodman, the guy who programmed Greasemonkey, and Johnnie Manzari, who worked as an interface designer at Adobe and currently handles the design needs of Slide, so you can at least be assured that we’re not talking out of our asses.

Quick FYI: The original title for this panel was:

Fuck Standards”

Just getting that out there…

We expect some hecklers and mudfights. Be prepared. Monday, 11:30am, at the Austin Convention Center. It’ll be fun.

— sergio on March 11, 2006