I’m at the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Plenary which is held during the W3C working groups annual meetings week, a time when we gather to have face-to-face meetings to discuss the work we are doing (I’m in the Education and Outreach Working Group in the Web Accessibility Initiative.
Being an organisation that sets standards for the web it’s unsurprising that one of the lightning talks, given by TV Raman from Google, touched upon the very essence of what W3C do and asked the question what makes standards succeed?
Whether you’re into web accessibility, mobile best practice, internationalisation or software accessibility (or a combination of the above) you’ll be dealing with standards and their implementation every day. Raman was very clear in saying “standards that work are ones that allow you to build on what you have done” and suggested the following are essential ingredients:
- Adaptation within the community
- Adaptation outside the target community
- Adaptation by follow-on work
We all bring something to the table whether you are a designer, developer, content editor, marketing person, manager, advocate, consultant, trainer the list goes on. But I’m curious to know, what do you think makes standards succeed?
Leave a comment and let us know what you think.
JackP | 13/11/2007 at 15:11 | Permalink
The standards have to be clear, at least relatively concise (e.g. WCAG 2 isn’t, but the quick reference document serves as a concise version), but above all they have to be useful.
It also helps if there is either a carrot (my site will be better if I adopt these standards) or a stick (nasty thing X will happen if I don’t adopt these standards).
Jean S | 22/11/2007 at 14:39 | Permalink
The standards have to be from a reputable source so that they can be trusted to have been thought out and tested. If I’m to sell them to my peers and advise they be adopted I need to know they’re worth adopting.
Henny | 26/11/2007 at 14:42 | Permalink
Thanks Jack and Jean for your thoughts, couldn’t agree with you more. Looks like standards are on a lot of people’s minds today as it is Blue Beanie Day - a day for promoting web standards by wearing a blue beanie.
I also stumbled acorss this artical Web Standards - Three Buckets of Pain also inspired by the talks help at the November W3C Technical Plenary. Worth a read.
Ozbon | 14/01/2008 at 12:17 | Permalink
Much as I hate myself for saying it, one of the big steps - with internet standards at least - is to get Microsoft to be behind the standard (rather than using one of their own).
MS is still the biggest OS (by a significant margin) and IE is the biggest browser (which makes me despair, but there we go) - if IE were actually standards compliant, most websites would be written to be IE compatible and thus standards compatible.
Making IE into an MS-Standard is the primary reason so many other standards (accessibility in particular) fall by the wayside. With the biggest market share, most companies still don’t give a stuff if their site is standards compliant, so long as it works in IE. I always work to make sure my sites do both, but commercially it’ll always be “IE” that takes precedence instead of “standards” until/unless MS adopt the same standards as everyone else.
Sad (and possibly heretical) but still true.