I had a discussion with one of my good friends today about standards, be they web standards or otherwise. His view is that a standard is only a standard if it’s adopted by everyone. I feel contrary to this in that a standard is a standard regardless of whether it’s supported by everyone or not.

Declaring something a standard on the web is only so, if everyone adheres to or recognizes them as such. We can’t even get Microsoft to adhere to web standards (tried using IE7?), so what makes it a standard unless there is a general, acknowledged recognition of such?

You hit it right on the head, there are standards for members of a religion that apply to members of that religion. Just as there are standards for web development that apply to web developers.

Here are the web standards.
http://www.webstandards.org/
http://www.w3.org/

Now I’m sure that there are some people of certain relgions that don’t adhere to the standards, but that doesn’t make them any less of a standard. The same can be said for any religion or organization, a standard is a standard regardless if people follow it or not. Just because not everyone follows them doesn’t mean they’re not standards.

Here’s what Mr. Webster has to say about it. Notice he says by general consent, not by unanimous consent.

3 : something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example : CRITERION >quite slow by today’s standards<
4 : something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 11:49 am and is filed under Accessibility, CSS, Design, HTML, Standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.