I didnt know HTML till I reached second year of University and used to feel insignificant when people used to say as a matter-of-fact, “yeah, I know HTML.”
I didnt know it till Deepak introduced me to blogging. In fact, my first blog design was implemented by him and “designed” by me. I learned it on the way, because I stumbled upon beautifully designed blogs. And luckily for me, they were blogs that loved web standards.
And in that way, I learned CSS and HTML. Good thing I was a newbie and didnt have to “unlearn” horrible tables and nonsense spacer gifs (that I had to learn those horrible and disgusting stuff again for a webdesign assignment, is another nightmare to scare you with).
And why should you, as a user, care about standards compliant design? After all, blogger does everything for you! You should, because:
- Slimes of India takes years to load.
- Most of the text are saved as images and all you get to see are “img123-332.jpg” and the browser permanently hanging there.
- Your favourite site can get skinned like your winamp.
- You see horrible spacers staring at you from the screen without anything else.
- The blind using speech readers can finally understand what you are trying to say.
- Google puts you on top of search results
- Because ESPN gives you several times improved experience because it has seen light.
- Your university results will come out much sooner than you would think (instead of “waiting for http://…”)!
- You dont have to blame your roommate for choking the bandwidth by downloading 1GB of pirated CDs everyday (which prevents you from accessing your favourite bandwidth wasting website mentioned first in the list).
- Because I care.
Here I present an awesome link to why Web Standards are critical to web design and how you can benefit from it. Demand it from your favourite sites. Write to them. Beg, plead, hit the sites that do not comply with web standards. Throw away browsers that do not comply with standards - you know well about which one I am talking about!
Your first step starts here.