As far as the boss can recall, that would probably have been at some point around 1999. Now, here we are in 2011 and we are designing websites for a living (along with Branding and Identity, Search Engine Optimization, Logos, and some CMS development work). If you want to know more about it, check out our website at http://www.integraphix.com for our amazing graphic design company in Chicago portfolio. Anyhoo, all of that brings us to the more relevant point that Integraphix has had their fingers in the web design world for a long time now (probably since before some readers could even really use a computer). However, back when we started with that first website, we really knew nothing about the Web and had never even heard of the whole concept of web design standards. Realistically, we don’t think many people had thought about it. Even the browsers of the time did not seem to be swayed all that strongly by standards and, as Microsoft released Internet Explorer as a competitor to Netscape, the first barrage of the browser wars began. New versions of software were being released almost as quickly as Google Chrome is today, and by the time we got to about 1996/1997, there were a ton of variations of Netscape and IE out there, with each variation offering its own take on the standard features. Those variations even included basic HTML rendering!
There were some things that you could do in Netscape that you simply couldn’t do in Internet Explorer, and vice versa – many of which were probably things that we wouldn’t even dream of doing today, or which we could do with much more elegance.
Scripting is a great example. Netscape was the first one to introduce JavaScript, causing Internet Explorer to follow suit by creating their own version of the same language (called jScript to get around trademark issues). But they really weren’t the same. The core and the syntax was pretty much identical, but each had functions, methods and properties that did not exist in the other. In some cases, these elements actually did the same things! They just had different names.
Oh, and did you know that there was actually something called VBScript too? It could be used in Internet Explorer, and we believe that we did implement it once as part of a browser checking routine.
Regardless, even though we were only peripherally involved in web design at the time, dabbling a bit here and there and working on them alongside our Graphic Design projects, the differences drove us absolutely bonkers. The web designers at Integraphix can only imagine what the other professionals that were working in the field every day were feeling. We knew a few people who started to get into the web design field at the time, but who quickly abandoned the idea because there were just too many variables to contend with when it came to browser compatibility and testing. Today, one of these people likes to remark “if you could spell HTML back in 1997, you were a web designer”. Actually, based on some of the sub-par sites that we have seen (and that people have paid for), there is probably still some truth to this. The point is that the writing was on the wall. If this thing we call the Web was going to continue to grow and become truly usable into the future, something was going to have to change. Things were needed to become more universal!
This is where Web Standards played such a significant role.
Now, Integraphix is not here to trace the history of the Web Standards crusade. We should probably know more about that history, and will make a point of trying to learn about it over time, but we're certainly not well-versed enough to be able to provide a comprehensive or accurate picture of how the standards movement has progressed. What we do know, however, is that we have certainly seen the incredible impact of that movement. Over the course of what could very well prove to be the most important decade in the history of the Web, we have moved from chaotic and entirely unpredictably fragmented landscape and into something far more universal. Yes, there are still variations to deal with and extensive browser testing to be undertaken (especially with the growing popularity of mobile devices). However, the great front-end triumvirate – HTML, CSS and JavaScript – have ultimately provided us with a solid, universal vocabulary through which to create, evolve and expand the Web.
The real beauty of it all is that, even as the languages and technologies that we are using continue to grow and expand, the actual act of designing and developing is becoming easier because clients (or browsers) are actually becoming increasingly consistent in the way they render things. About 90% of the time, if something looks right in Firefox, it will also look right in Safari and Chrome (both built on Webkit). Generally speaking it will also look right in most recent versions of Opera, though that particular browser does tend to be somewhat less forgiving (many strange behaviours in Opera can be remedied by simply validating your code!).
Of course, Internet Explorer does still tend to be the odd one out, especially if we have to support IE6 for whatever reason, but we’ve even found that the more standards compliant we make our code (which includes using strict modes), the less work we actually have to do trying to fix all the weird IE rendering problems that seem to crop up.
In fact, a few months ago we were getting ready to launch a new site for a client and had set aside an entire evening just to deal with IE issues. We had done all our design and development with Firefox and Safari and saved IE for last (standard procedure for us). We were expecting to take several hours to get everything working and were pleasantly surprised when almost everything rendered perfectly in IE7.
Then we were done. It took less than an hour of work and freed up the rest of our day!
While there is certainly much, much more that can be written about Web Standards, we view all of what we have looked at in this article as further evidence to support the need for standards. Even more importantly, it gives us a greater sense of hope for the future. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, it can be easy to feel as though we are moving towards a situation similar to the browser wars of the mid-to-late nineties, seemingly designing for two different incompatible media. Back then it was Netscape and Internet Explorer; today it may seem to be the computer and the mobile device.
We don’t think that’s the case, though. Standard and mobile browsing are both built around the same core. They both make use primary of standardized HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which makes them far more compatible than Netscape and Internet Explorer used to be. As such, and given what we have considered through the course of this article, we have every confidence that Web Standards will help bridge this apparent gap and keep us moving continuously forward into an increasingly mobile Web.
