September 28, 2007

Death of a Standardista

I've never liked the term standardista. Though it gets used with pride by some, I've always heard as a subtle insult. It's the "ista" part that bothers me. To my ear, this makes one sound like a zealot, someone whose passion is potentially blinding. Now, it's true that I'm passionate about web standards. But this is only because web standards support the production of better websites. If spit and chicken wire worked as well, I'd be passionate about spit and chicken wire. If I'm any kind of "ista," I recently realized, I'm a qualityista.

That moment was an epiphany for me. For one thing, it helped me understand the depth of my frustration with, say, the poor writing on some of my clients' sites. I want to make great websites; I have no interest in building kick-ass containers for crappy content. If you've ever worked with me, you know what I mean.

For some developers, the only thing that matters is a happy client. If the client is happy, the project is a success, period. When you think this way, your job is to determine what would make your client happy and deliver it, regardless of what you're delivering. In extreme cases, the quality of the completed site will depend entirely on the client's understanding of what makes for a quality website, because the developer is loath to contradict anything the client says or believes.

I'd like to think that few developers are really so spineless, so lacking in, well, standards. Instead, most failed sites are made by people who want to make good websites but simply lack the necessary skills or understanding. Somehow I find this more forgivable than the brown nose behavior described above, although the result is the same: a sucky website.

But back to my epiphany. What I saw in that moment is that my allegiance is not to web standards, nor to any particular approach or methodology, but to an elusive yet crucial result which for lack of a better term I'm calling "quality." I'm obsessed by it. I want to see it, understand it, and most of all, create it. I really am a qualityista. If you've ever worked with me, you know what I mean.

Published in WWW, Web Standards