"You're pretending that there's one standard, but since nobody has a way to test against the standard, it's not a real standard." — Software pundit Joel Spolsky on the impossibility of conforming to Web standards. If you're a Web developer, Spolsky's 4,738-word treatise, with illustrations, is worth reading on your employer's time.

1:40 PM on Tue Mar 18 2008
By Paul Boutin
1,348 views
9 comments

Comments

Nathan at 02:07 PM on 03/18/08
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See, I have a problem with this statement because there IS one standard. The w3c publishes the spec. This is, and should be treated as 'The Standard'.
cowsandmilk at 02:14 PM on 03/18/08
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@Nathan: your knowledge of w3c spec is weak. Any browser vendor can tell you that the spec does not say what to do in many cases that are legal syntax, which leaves them guessing what is best to do.
Tim Faulkner at 02:41 PM on 03/18/08
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"f you had told Postel that there would be 90 million untrained people, not engineers, creating web sites, and they would be doing all kinds of awful things, and some kind of misguided charity would have caused the early browser makers to accept these errors and display the page anyway, he would have understood that this is the wrong principle, and that, actually, the web standards idealists are right, and the way the web "should have" been built would be to have very, very strict standards and every web browser should be positively obnoxious about pointing them all out to you and web developers that couldn't figure out how to be "conservative in what they emit" should not be allowed to author pages that appear anywhere until they get their act together."

Finest defense of Apple's iPhone developer program I've read... oh wait, that was about Internet Explorer?
sample032 at 03:08 PM on 03/18/08
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Connectedness Index: 74
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"...all kinds of awful things..."

Honestly, no one could have foreseen Meebo.
matto at 03:09 PM on 03/18/08
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Connectedness Index: 186
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Still waiting for the zinger from Ted.
Patricia2 at 03:28 PM on 03/18/08
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Connectedness Index: 54
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Add it to the list...
Wabewalker at 06:05 PM on 03/18/08
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More importantly, read Mark Pilgrim’s response: Translation to English of Spolsky's 'Martian Headsets', which tears Spolsky so many new ones he’ll whistle in a strong breeze.

Sample line: “Hi, I’m Web Developer Barbie. Pull my string and I say, ‘Standards are tough! Let's go shopping!’”
ThatKid at 04:04 AM on 03/19/08
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@Wabewalker: Pilgrim gets in some snide remarks as always, but that doesn't make him right.
ifstone at 03:58 PM on 03/24/08
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The foundation of the electronic economy is built on sand and designed by children.

@cowsandmilk: Yes, and what's so frustrating about "software engineering" is that sloppy specs are now the rule, not the exception. An entire generation has grown up that's never seen a rigorous spec.

And we're starting to see the opposite phenomenon of sites that were only tested with IE: sites that only get tested on Firefox ("It's following the standard!") and break with IE or Opera or iRider or Safari.

Over ten years ago, I remember thinking that the compatibility problems with IE and Netscape would eventually get sorted out.