Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

Reading through the comments to the compooter.org article, it seems they contain the beginnings of an interesting, if occasionally heated, dialogue between the SEO and standards worlds. That’s a pure good, IMNSHO.

If the message of the SES crowd in the comments is indeed what they were preaching at the conference it seems there’s more than a little overlap between their concept of best practices in web design and ours.

Here’s an idea: perhaps we standards folks and the SEO crowd should do a bit of knowledge sharing? In the comments, Danny Sullivan said he’s already asked Eric Meyer to do just that, with an eye towards a possible speaking slot at an upcoming SES no less. That’s a great start. But I think we can do more. I think there’s gold to be found at the intersection of SEO and standards, or at least some good web development.

Let’s keep the begining of dialogue in the comments to the compooter.org post, throw out the flames and ignorance, and use it to build a better set of best practices for web development. One that accounts for standards, accessibility, usability and search engines.

Maybe one of the new samaritans can redesign one of the sites linked above, or that of session moderator Chris Sherman’s company, or panelist Dan Stone’s company or the companion site for Shari Thruow’s book (though that last is pretty close to the money as-is).

Or maybe we should work on some other site, one upon which nobody’s livelihood depends. Use it as a test bed for accessible, standards- and search engine-friendly web development techniques.

Or perhaps just knowledge-sharing, as Eric and Danny are doing, will be enough to find the intersect.

Whatever. Let’s just not let this opportunity go to waste.

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