Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

What are standards? Well, as far as the WaSP is concerned, ‘web standards’ are a whole bunch of interrelated standards that form the basis of most of the web pages that you visit every day: HTML/XHTML, CSS, DOM, ECMAScript and so on. These are all documented and owned by the W3C and serve as a reference point for anyone and everyone who wants to conform to the standards. But these are not the only standards …

There are a whole raft of de facto standards – or perhaps that’s not the most appropriate word for them – that are not documented and signed off as being the absolute and unquestionable truth. Sure, there are articles galore that cover the perceived best practices for web design all over the web, but if you were to try to package all these de facto standards together into one document, what would you get? Heidi Adkisson attempted to pull this information together, and you can find a summary of this in her piece at Boxes and Arrows entitled
Examining the Role of De Facto Standards on the Web. A quote from the piece reads:

“Surprisingly, I found very little research documenting the frequency of seemingly common (perhaps even standard) design practices such as the left-hand navigation bar, blue underlined links, and top-of-the-page global navigation. I was surprised because as a consultant working with clients, every project seemed to bump up against strongly held beliefs about what was ‘standard’ on the web. I had my suspicions, but no data, that solutions being put forth as standard were common but by no means employed by all (or nearly all) sites. I wondered: Are de facto standards on the web myth or reality? I decided to investigate.”

If you want more detail, the findings have been put to good use – Heidi has created a new site entitled Web Design Practices – Examining Current Design Practices on the Web.

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