Web-volution, the broken link.

I have this dream of starting a new online forum/publication of my own. I want it to be about the dreamers who are taking the web to the next level. The people who don’t accept the reality that is 90% of the web, but are willing to make a difference in design one small corner of the web at a time. I have a long list of potential contributors already written. And I think it has the potential to grow with what I see as the coming tide of standards-compliant designers and coders. I still meet recent graduates of design schools who’s own portfolios are a mess of tables and slices and I spend time crying into my pillow at night. But I also meet people on the web who understand that there are reasons for this righteous crusade that we’ve embarked on, and that the web faces the same sustainability issues as our planet does right now. I’m reading a book right now called “designing with web standards” by Jeffrey Zeldman. The introduction begins with an analogy that I can sink my teeth into:

There was a time not that long ago when many drivers thought nothing of tossing empty bottles out the windows of their cars. Years later, these same citizens came to realize that littering was not an acceptable way to dispose of their trash. The web design community is now undergoing a similar shift in attitude, and web standards are the key to this transformation.

On the flip side, I’m amazed at how many web developers are still scared of CSS in general and have no idea what web standards are. We can see the shining light up in the sky, but our fins are still developing into legs, and we’re just starting to come up onto land. The future of the web is (potentially) bright, but the vast majority of the web is still stuck in a morass of table data cells and javascript rollovers. And the bane that is Frontpage still weighs heavily on the web-volution, along with it’s big brother, Internet Explorer. Frontpage is spitting out proprietary code, Explorer is reading it and people are using it. And Microsoft is giving it away (or shoving it down our throats, as it may be). Even Dreamweaver disappoints me fairly often with the junk it sticks into my webpages. I use Dreamweaver for code highlighting and integrated FTP. That’s about it. TextMate, Transmit and TextWrangler, Xylescope and others… there are affordable and free ways to write better code. Of course, that’s just for OS X. There is a plethora of freeware for Windows as well.

So there’s an evolution underway. Our clients might not realize it, or understand it, but the future and sustainability of the web depends on it. Properly done, the end user will never know the difference. They’ll just know that the websites they visit work, work well, and work consistently when they show it to a friend on a different browser. Evolution is a slow process, and beasts like Internet Explorer will slow us down that much more, but the final product should be worth the wait.