FOWD: Open Web Standards for the Rich Web

Written by @jonrundle on November 16, 2009

Molly Holzschlag is an experienced web developer and open web standards evangelist, a member of the W3C and has most recently been working for Opera software. Her session was meant to help us all understand more about open web standards, where they have come from, where they are going, and all the challenges along the way.

So we'll start it off with some of the basics. The web is meant to be as open, accessible and universal as possible in order to reach as many users as possible in the quickest and most effective amount of time. Molly touched on the different web philosophies, such as it being:

Accessible (available to all people)
Universal (universal across modalities)
User Agent Agnostic (available to any browser)
Platform Agnostic (available to any platform)
Global/Local (available to a range of languages and cultures)

Molly also discussed that the experience doesn't always have to be the exact same from browser to browser or from platform to platform. We can't expect a site to function the exact same on a smart phone as it does on our desktop computers and as web designers we have to be aware of that and find ways to best display our content to our users.

It is very important for web applications especially to follow very strict standards in order for them to function properly and to keep bringing users back to them. Web applications need to do a couple of things:

Encourage practical, accessible and meaningful interactivity
Encourage a "write once, play anywhere" philosophy (CSS, Javascript)
Provide proven standards-related technical and management benefits
Embrace backward compatibility and progressive enhancement

This was all very good background information for me and to helped me understand and learn more about how the web needs to be in order for users to have the best possible experience. We've had some challenges throughout the years with these standards, especially when dealing in different browsers and technologies.

Probably the most common challenge now a days is designing and developing for Internet Explorer 6. We discussed the reason why it isn't necessarily going to be going away anytime soon because it is tied so heavily into the Windows OS that making big changes to it takes many years and lots of testing to make sure it works in all versions of Windows. As well, many users and companies still rely heavily on certain technologies integrated into IE6 that they can't work without. This makes it very challenging to support IE6, as we don't want to restrict our web sites from reaching their full potential in order to support outdated browsers.

Now to the future - there is some very interesting and exciting stuff coming down the pipe in terms of new web based technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3. HTML5 is going to help to bring a whole new experience to the web, one where even more of the functionality of a web page is going to be in the structure of the page instead of just in the behaviours of the page. The canvas tag, and being able to embed video straight onto a web page are just a couple of the exciting features coming from HTML5. And the best part? All major browsers are committed and ready to go full on with it!

CSS3 is also very exciting and has a lot of new ideas and functionality that has never been seen in CSS before. Features such as multiple backgrounds, opacity, media queries (which I thought was really neat), and font-embedding.

There is definitely a lot more to learn about when it comes to web standards and where it's still evolving and moving towards, I will be sure to try and stay on top of it and continue to learn more about how the web works and how we can bring it all together to the end user.