So the thinking behind RefreshCleveland is partly to promote web standards in the real world and their adoption by designers and developers in the Cleveland area.  But what standards should we be promoting?

There seems to be a rumble amongst the big name advocates on this very subject.  Partly brought about by the “Dear W3C, Dear WaSP” post by Molly.  I saw this trickling through my feeds even before I reached Molly’s blog.  Jeremy Keith’ s post was the first and others followed, while Patrick Lauke and Tantek Çelik slugged it out in the comments of Molly’s blog.

These big names cite apathy towards the organizations and a desire to just get on with it and use the standards we have.  I sort of agree.  I was one of the first people at Optiem to promote web standards within our day-to-day production and I still bang the drum four years on. But I just don’t think we need HTML5 and how long before browsers support CSS3 (they hardly fully support CSS2 now)?  I still see sites that are developed recently that don’t get HTML4 transitional right, let alone XHTML Strict.

Does anyone disagree?  Should we just concentrate on getting the basics right, with maybe the addition of some newer pieces such as microformats and the currently supported CSS, and let the browsers and other developers catch up?

What would you like to see as the standard that Cleveland web firms put out?

Technorati tags: web standards, standards, w3c, advocates, css3

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Aaron Gustafson has written a post for A List Apart called Beyond DOCTYPE: Web Standards, Forward Compatibility, and IE8 which is already courting some negatives in the discuss area.

The upshot is that IE7 “broke” some websites that were fine in IE6 all because of the DOCTYPE (mentioned in our podcast) and the practice of DOCTYPE switching.

Aaron has worked with team IE and they have come up with a method of using a <meta> tag to target the rendering engine that the upcoming IE8 should use.

My initial knee-jerk reaction is WTF! But now the Chai is kicking in I’ll make a point of going back and re-reading.

Go read the post for yourself and the comments. Then read Eric Meyer’s article, From Switches to Targets.

I’m not convinced this isn’t a baby step backwards but we’ll see.

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Tags: doctype, alist apart, ie8