Website Development Standards
From an accessibility perspective, we put Website Development and Accessibility together the other day. It advocates the move to accessibility and standards from a humanist perspective.
Now a more pragmatic approach —
Accessibility is Built upon Standards
Let's look for an ROI (return on investment) reward-based argument. Well ... in the UK alone, Silver Surfers are a 14 £billion market. Many will take advantage of text resizing in their browsers to make surfing a little more tolerable. Accessibility is build upon W3C standards. Get those sorted and the rest is easy. The point being, the more standardised your markup, the more traffic, from search engines whose spiders can more easily index the copy, to users who can more easily navigate, view and, if ecommerce, buy products ... and who will more readily bookmark the site simply because it is usable. Now throw in people with various impairments and the equation becomes more than just viable, it is vital to capture and retain their spending power by building sites to which they will gladly return and exercise their right to vote accessible.
Now ... look to the future and we have a whole bunch of PDAs, WAP-enabled cellphones, tablet PCs and emergent technology whose screen sizes will vary but whose OS's (albeit proprietary in many instances) will accept X(HT)ML feeds. This is the present and the future. We're talking big, accessible, standards-compliant bucks.
Without standards (irrespective of the who, why and wherefore of the originating bodies) web development would ramble on in the wilderness with numerous competing technologies vying for position and developers writing disparate browser-specific markup with a total disregard for the issues faced by either impaired users or those who elect to use non mainstream browsers like the Geckos, Opera or whatever.
Professional Development
In my view, it's a falsehood to suggest that standards-compliant markup is a challenge to embrace. In comparison to using FrontPage or similar WYSIWYG editors then, yes, having to develop W3C compliant code and get your hands dirty is more time consuming and requires a greater knowledge base and effort on the part of the developer. But Web development, professional development, is not an easy task. Like any skill, there is a period of apprenticeship ... and some body - our peers and dare I say betters - must set the entrance and exit exams - the standards - to which we aspire.
I take an active part in a few of these bodies because 1. I believe in what is happening within the industry, the move towards Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a fully accessible communications medium available to all nations and individuals on the planet and 2. I like being paid to offer my clients a greater return on investment than they would otherwise expect from non-compliant development.
It's good common business sense and a courtesy to develop for as great an audience as reasonably practicable.
