Web and nappies: Without standards we all come unstuck

Web standards evangelist Lea Verou recently started working for the World Wide Web Consortium. This move is good news for web standards, as she is a passionate and high-profile communicator. And what is good for web standards is good for everyone.

But what on Earth have web standards got to do with nappies? Making the job easier, that's what.

While changing nappies, I have noticed that the animals always go at the front. The bit near the belly button, the area that the tabs attach to. I only really noticed this when I used Huggies nappies recently, and they had an animal at the back as well, and it right put me off my nappy-changing stride.

In the middle of the night, I cursed Huggies for their non-conformance to Nappy Standards.

It's the same with web standards. If you know that margin and padding are always in addition to a box width, then you only have to think once about calculating dimensions — thanks IE5. Standards such as frameworks make the web development job easier, so you don't have to reinvent several wheels to accommodate oddball browsers.

And at the bottom of it all is the dissemination of information. Christian Heilmann recently wrote about video formats in Reaching The Audience vs Puerile Purity, where he states: "Getting the message out is the most important part."

Video formats and open standards are an integral part of the process but not the point of the exercise. The point is the message.

Now I know why to write clean code

Everybody knows that you should build a website mobile first: get the functionality right for mobile and everything else follows.

Unfortunately, I've been in the real-world situation of retrospectively fitting an adaptive, mobile version of a site.

Now I know why to write clean code and why to build mobile first. Like web standards, it makes the job easier.

I understand the time pressures and communication issues many agencies are faced with, which lead to retrospective mobile sites and hurried mark-up. Us web developers need all the help we can get, and web standards make it easier for everyone.

Postscript

This blog post was written before I was aware of Bruce Lawson's excellent post on standards and sausages, which looks at how standards are created - in comparison with sausages, not nappies.