Rodent Regatta

Reading Zeldman’s book has been an eye-opener. The costs associated with web design from the mid-90’s to the present are enormous. The proportion of those costs which were avoidable by employing web standards is the most eye-opening aspect of the whole picture.

I was reading Tim Bray’s site this morning. He said, ”If you were looking at this in any browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer, it would look and run better and faster.” The message of Zeldman’s book is that it would also cost less to develop, use less bandwidth, be forward compatible and be less costly to maintain.

So, I opened Tim’s site in Opera 7.1.

I was blown away. Rather than the big, wide column of text that I’ve been seeing in IE6, the site is a nice, readable width roughly equal to two column-widths of a daily newspaper.

Web standards.