The Rise of Web Standards

[mandy]

It's hard to remember what the Web was like in 1995, when Jeffrey Zeldman designed his first site. However, suffice it to say that in those days "WWW" might as well have stood for the Wild West Web -- there were no rules and no best practices.

In a way, it was a time of great experimentation, but Zeldman soon came to see the flip side: The chaos was leading to user frustration and spiraling development and maintenance costs that threatened healthy development of the Web...

Zeldman helped to pioneer the movement known as standards-based design -- a yawn-inducing term that basically ensures that a Web site can be used by someone using any browser and any Web-enabled device.

This concept may seem obvious today, but during the Browser Wars of the 1990s, Microsoft and Netscape each claimed close to 50 percent of the market, and their browsers were almost entirely incompatible...

full article: http://ecommercetimes.com/story/B1aHOP4y...ards.xhtml