Web standards see increasing adoption

 

Years ago few cared about web stan­dards laid out by the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium. Today’s a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, as there are prob­a­bly a lot more peo­ple fol­low­ing stan­dards — even monop­o­lies like Microsoft.

The past
Ever since the browser wars, there were cer­tainly more browsers to choose from. How­ever, each browser is designed dif­fer­ently, and with it comes its incom­pat­i­bil­i­ties. Although there was suf­fi­cient time for the even­tual win­ner (which is Inter­net Explorer) of the first browser war, not much was done to actu­ally con­form to the new web standards. 

Mak­ing sites look the same across browsers require the usage of “hacks” which in its own already defies standards. This prac­tise remained in pop­u­lar­ity until the sec­ond browser war, which still con­tin­ues today. The new­comer — Fire­fox, has its strengths, mak­ing it much potent com­pared to Inter­net Explorer, espe­cially in the area of standard-compliance.

Closer to mod­ern
Over time, new stan­dards were made, notably Extended HTML, and Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets  ver­sion 2 and 3. There was adop­tion, but not fast enough. By 2006, only a small frac­tion of sites con­sid­ered tak­ing up XHTML, let alone CSS 2. This slow adop­tion rate was caused by a few hur­dles on sev­eral sides — the browsers, and the web­mas­ters. Some browsers, such as Inter­net Explorer did not rec­tify some issues with its sup­port for web stan­dards until 2007, which was when Inter­net Explorer 7 came. For­tu­nately, there were oth­ers that were fast to adopt such new stan­dards, such as the open-source Fire­fox and Opera browsers.

On the web­mas­ters side, it is sad to say that some may not even have heard of stan­dards (after all, the inter­net is sup­posed to be an open place). Exper­i­men­ta­tion was all it takes to get a design, which was unlikely tested on more than 1 browser. How­ever, those who do hear about web stan­dards tried their hand at it, and those who did man­aged to fol­low the stan­dards deserves some praise.

Today 
Today, we see more sites that are increas­ingly adopt­ing the web stan­dards set out by W3. There are now 12 times more sites fol­low­ing web stan­dards com­pared to years ago. Part of that increase in adop­tion is ini­ti­ated by some projects, such as Word­press which began using standard-compliant XHTML in its Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem (known as a weblog), and Wikipedia which also adopts XHTML. Due to this ini­ti­a­tion, web design­ers find it an incen­tive to make their lay­outs standard-complaint. In addi­tion, ever since the release of the val­ida­tors by W3C, adopt­ing stan­dards has become much eas­ier than before. Bearing that new “XHTML com­plaint” sticker has become a new fad.

How­ever, increas­ing does not mean that a lot of peo­ple are adopt­ing it. As much as 70% of all sites still hasn’t adopted the web stan­dards — even the largest Inter­net giants have yet to do it. How­ever, see­ing as the browsers them­selves are already attempt­ing to “fol­low the rules”, these sites may or will even­tu­ally fol­low web standards.

Obsta­cles to adop­tion
We still do not see at least a 90% adop­tion rate of web stan­dards even after 10 years (equiv­a­lent to 2/3 of the Inter­nets cur­rent age) since they were set out. The main aim of web stan­dards is to ensure that things work, and they work cor­rectly for every­one. How­ever, that aim will need decades to work, because of the prob­lem of com­pat­i­bil­ity. The lat­est tech­nolo­gies and stan­dards pro­posed by W3C, are not in imple­men­ta­tion until sev­eral months later. This “big-gap” will cause the snail-pace adop­tion in web standards.

Even if a par­tic­u­lar browser were to imple­ment all such web stan­dards, it would not be effec­tive unless it has a major­ity share of the browser mar­ket. Updat­ing browsers may not be easy either, espe­cially if the browser is pro­pri­etary - e.g. in the case of Inter­net Explorer, users have to con­tin­u­ally upgrade the Oper­at­ing Sys­tem so as to get the lat­est browser. In addi­tion, not every­one knows about web stan­dards — per­haps it was not well adver­tised, or just that not every­one is bring­ing it up.

Because of the browser’s slow adop­tion of web stan­dards, web­mas­ters and design­ers them­selves are not too keen to fol­low web stan­dards — either because their lay­outs look the same across browsers already (even though it does not pass val­i­da­tion), or that they want it to func­tion the same way across browsers (bring­ing back to the com­pat­i­bil­ity problem).

Future
Adop­tion is slow even today, but it is a sure sign that it is grow­ing. How­ever, the prob­lems of incom­pat­i­bil­ity may still con­tinue to hin­der the adop­tion of web stan­dards even in the future.

Tagged as: Standards, W3C