MACCAWS has released a white paper, “The Way Forward with Web Standards” and a companion non-technical primer. It’s so strange that we’re still fighting this battle. Why is it that we can be in a rush to meet standards like J2EE — which is difficult to understand & implement and is often overkill — but meet such formidable resistance to the suggestion that we meet basic web standards, which are easy to understand & implement and have such clear benefits? Marketing, I suppose. I face this all the time:

  • “Of course we should strive for accessibility, but we shouldn’t spend extra time on it.” Never mind that if we do it right in the first place (i.e. employ web standards), accessibility pretty much falls into place with no extra effort.
  • “What does it matter that this CMS doesn’t generate valid HTML? It still looks fine to me.” Sigh.

Hopefully the MACCAWS project will help.