KuraFire Network

Mailing lists, to me, serve two purposes (and if they don't, I don't subscribe to them and consider them a waste of time): to entertain, and to spark important debate on relatively to very important issues. The debate aspect includes valuable learning experiences, even when there is no real outcome of the debate. Discussion on certain web standards-related topics itself can be more valuable than an outcome, because it gives you a chance to (re-)establish your goals in this industry, your take on the topics themselves and, if you feel it right to do so, change your position on something. On one mailing list I'm on we've just discussed, to great length, the importance of semantic markup and the uses and validity of elements such as <b> and <i>. During the discussion, I noticed a trend that took me by surprise, which effectively sparked this post.

What happens when you work towards a certain long-term goal for many years straight? Besides (hopefully) getting the occasional step towards it accomplished, you run the risk of falling into a trap. This trap is what I would like to call the Professional Comfort Zone. The PCZ is a state of mind where, after a certain amount of accomplishments, you feel you have reached enough of your long-term goal that you no longer need to work as hard and intensively on getting there. Most of the time, this isn't actually such a bad thing as now you'll just focus on getting more hands-on work accomplished with your established expertise. A good thing.

However, the risk lies in the subconscious side-effect of thinking you no longer need to work at all in getting closer to the long-term goal. We've seen this happen with professors and educators on the field of web design and development, who are to this day still stuck in their belief that the web has not changed since 1996 and feel completely in their place to teach the same old and horribly outdated methods to all their students. A bad thing.

In many of the world's industries, taking a year or two off from staying up to date with the latest and greatest developments won't cause a great deal of harm necessarily. You may have to do a quick and intensive bit of catching up once you want to get "in the loop" again, but it's nothing of great significance. On the industry that is the Web, taking as much as a month off from staying up to date can be a real problem. This incredibly rapidly-changing industry does not allow you to sit still and simply get your work done. If you want to be completely up to date with what's shaping tomorrow's face of the Web, you need to be connected 24/7, read at least a dozen or two blogs (but don't feel like you're overdoing it when you're reading 200) and, preferably, attend a conference or gathering of some sort at least four times a year. Right.

It is no wonder that it has become virtually impossible to be truly up to date with every facet of the Web and all of its newest developments, but not to fret: all is not lost just yet. There are many solutions to keep you in the loop enough not to worry about running behind, and they don't require as much time and effort at all.

The trick is to not only be constantly active, but also to have a good discussion about the Web every so often and to take a good, long look at what you're doing, but above all, why you're doing it. And if you're like me, a Standardista / advocate of Web Standards / standards enthousiast, you really should think about the "why" in as large a perspective as you can. We're shaping a relatively brand-new industry here, and we're shaping it for the long run, the whole nine yards.

In bed!

Some of my friends and I have a crazy tradition, which I'm sure many of you will have heard of (or even have, yourselves): when eating Chinese food, we open our fortune cookies and read the fortune out loud. Then, either out loud or to ourselves, no matter what it says, we add "in bed" at the end.

It's purely for fun, since most fortunes tend to become quite a bit funnier when you append "in bed" to them. A big surprise awaits you - in bed! A lie in time saves nine - in bed! Don't use a computer to do things that can be done efficiently by hand - in bed!

When reading some of the discussion's arguments in favor of the use of <b> and <i>, I was reminded of this fortune cookie-tradition because I kept adding a certain word to the arguments: "now."

What happened is that whenever someone debated in favor of using those deprecated elements, the argument would be something like this: "But what if I just want to have this little bit of text italic?" "I don't want to add actual strong emphasis to this title, I just want it to be bold." "Usually, you see these things italicized, but I don't intend to have them be emphasized. I just want them to appear italic without any additional meaning."

Now. Now. Now. What about in ten years? Or heck, what about next year?

Going the extra mile - literally

Industry standards are never meant for a short term goal. They are made for the long term, which is why they take a long time to be created. It takes tremendous care and planning to construct a standard that will make sense for many years yet to come, because nobody can predict the future. We can't, with any real certainty, predict the future of the technology that we are working with every day in our lives, we can only extrapolate and make well-balanced guesses. Creating an industry standard is doing that-and more.

The World Wide Web Consortium creates our industry's standards, but it is people like you and I and organisations like the Web Standards Project that fight for the correct uses and implementation of these standards. Having an industry standard exist is not good enough when nobody uses it, or uses it properly.

But even us Standardistas are not safe from the Professional Comfort Zone. We, too, can fall prey to its call. That's why we need to keep ourselves on our toes, at least every so often. A healthy debate about the importance of semantics can do just that.

We're here not for the quick and dirty. We're here for the long run, and we need to keep that in mind at all times. Why are we fighting for the proper uses of web standards? Because there is more to creating websites than the here and now. There is tomorrow, and tomorrow may not be like today at all.

Using proper semantic markup that is based solely on the meaning of our content is a good preparation for tomorrow. While you may want that title or that bit of text to look bold now, it is not necessarily what you want it to look like tomorrow. Is it something that deserves emphasis in what it means? Use a <strong> or <em> element. Do you just want to add a bit of visual flair to it now? Use a <span> element with a class or id attribute, and style it with CSS.

Separate your structure and presentation, even for the littlest things. We're fighting for web standards* so that we don't have to constantly go back and change our markup whenever we want things to look differently, and having to style a <b> element so that it is no longer bold but instead italicized just means you're going about it in the wrong way.

We're fighting for standards that are here to stay, just like our pages. Let's give them a chance, and think about things in the long-term perspective.

* Of course, this is just one of the many reasons why we fight for web standards. There is interoperability, flexibility, cleanliness, manageability and so much more.

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