Standards are only good if they are standard…

Semantic obsolescence [dive into mark]

"Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I'm still stuck in a dead end."

Really. What’s a person supposed to do? Andy and I have advocated for the use of proper HTML and CSS, etc within our company. Part of our argument was portability, consistency and compatibility going forward. (Being able to separate content from presentation did allow us to scale our work beyond one or two people per project.)

User agent incompatibilities are very real. Accessibility is a big issue with us and a constant source of annoyance is that screen readers aren’t themselves user agents. They simply scrape the page source provided by a browser. Again, standards go out the window. There is no use for some of the CSS media types that focus on non-visual presentation.

Of course the problems are not just that the W3C may be changing the specs around. The companies that produce web browsers, screen readers, handheld devices, etc, do not correctly implement the recommendations either. Progress has been made in this over the last year, but dramatically changing the standard, like the W3C is proposing, will set things back quite a ways.

"Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant." Mark might just be right…