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I know that New Year’s Resolutions are sort of a running joke to some people, but I actually take them pretty seriously and get a lot out of them.  The trick to good New Year’s Resolutions for me have been to treat them like I treat my work: I make sure I know why I’m doing everything I do, I plan out how I’m going to do them and how I’m going to measure my success, and then I give myself opportunities to evaluate and adjust throughout the life of the project.  As a tradition, it’s got built-in positive feedback because the coming of every New Year gives me a chance to look back at my past achievements.

But this blog post isn’t about how to make your New Years Resolutions stick – the media will be filled with those stories in the coming weeks.  This is about something I think should be on everybody’s list: Web Standards.

In the Web Development community, we tend to refer to Web Standards as a single item or action, one tool we use or don’t use, one practice we follow or don’t follow, one coherent philosophy we adhere to or don’t adhere to.  We do this even though we all know this isn’t true.  ‘Web Standards’ refers to a list of best practices and suggestions, what Captain Jack Sparrow would call ‘more like guidelines’, and a constantly evolving list at that – the Web is not static, the way we build applications on the eve of 2009 is different than it was this time last year, and the best practices for device and browser compliance and accessibility need to change, too.

Now is a great time to look at your Web site’s content and functionality – the design, the code and the behaviors – to make sure it works on every user agent and for every user.

The end of 2008 has brought us some unique opportunities to make Web Standards a bigger priority. First, the release of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 by the W3C on 12/11/08 offers us all a new set of industry-wide guidelines to compare our work to in these Ajax-enabled times.  And second, the proliferation of new browsers and Web enabled devices and platforms, from Google’s Chrome browser to Apple’s iPhone and from Linux-powered Netbooks with 9-inch screens to easy to operate and use screen-reading Firefox plug-ins, gives us both a lot to think about and a lot of incentive to think about it as our audience of users expects better functionality wherever and however they access our sites.

In 2009, I intend to take the WCAG 2.0 to heart for my applications, and to continue to learn about writing more accessible forms, and I look forward to the exciting challanges presented by Web enabled smartphones and other iterations of the mobile Web.  I’m also excited to brush up on microformats.  How can you put Web Standards on your list of resolutions?

Tags: web standards

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Design, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.