Rodent Regatta

Since 1976 my work has dealt with I.T. in distribution environments. It’s covered everything from distributed computing architectures to customer-oriented systems to vendor supply chain problems. We’ve worked with some big companies and some small companies to align their I.T. projects with the strategic goals of the business.

Through all of that we fought the absence of standards. There weren’t standard field sizes for data. There weren’t standard nomenclatures for data. Systems simply weren’t designed to work with other systems.

Cut to the 1990’s. A few forward-looking companies began to see the advantages of standards in key areas. One outgrowth of this in one industry is RosettaNet. This group discovered that there was value in standards. Electrical wall outlets that are similar from one room to another make sense! Other industries have now made similar discoveries.

Cut to the last 24 hours. Jeffrey Zeldman’s book and Shirley Kaiser’s Brainstorms and Raves coupled with Steven Vore’s comment flipped all my lights on. I see the importance of web standards as they relate to web design, browsers, tool selection, etc.

Sure, one can cobble together some HTML that works in I.E. For a single weblog, that’s probably just fine – until it isn’t. The notion of standards as they relate to forward compatibility is profound – whether we’re talking about large transaction counts between customer-supplier systems or simple weblogs. I intend to jump on the standards bandwagon.

I don’t intend to become evangelistic or political about it. Even the standards organizations permit ”transitional” sites free of the ”strict” adherence to standards which sometimes takes more time rather than less. It just seems very logical to move from my current level (or lack) of knowledge to the next level by keeping standards-based design in view.

Now my challenge is to back up and figure out how to bring this weblog’s past entries into standards compliance. Do I simply export all my entries, fix them with an editor and re-import them? I’m not sure. One of the sites that teaches ”skinning” says this at the beginning, ”Your mantra: fix your site before you skin it, or you’ll regret it.”

More to learn.