Crimes Against Web Standards with Molly Holzschlag

Keynote: Crimes Against Web Standards with Molly Holzschlag

Starting off the first day of the conference, we have Molly presenting the keynote, WSI: Vancouver - Crimes Against Web Standards. (I had to use a point form just to keep up with her quick and fantastic delivery.)

• introduction by Dave Shea
• representatives from Microsoft introducing Molly They were very self-depracating.

Molly starts:

Who came in when on developing for the web?

• 6 people who haven’t built a web site with tables
• huge group who haven’t used frames
• half know what a doctype looks like

Molly will be looking at her own code crimes, other crimes and our own crimes against web standards.

• began in 1993, the web was text based. no GUI-based browser.
• in search of space… (mick garrison) using afor space. Jeremy Keith knew that it validates.
• second example has two’s but nowadays the second was useless.
• next example with plenty of line breaks. in this example, tried to create a two column layout.
• funny video from eric (”In my day, you’d take a blink tag and wrap it in a marquee tag”)

In search of wysiwyg

• showing example from golive with embedded attributes (interestingly, product manager for golive was in audience)
• next example showing code generated from dreamweaver
• another example from Dreamweaver showing all the body attributes like leftmargin and marginwidth
• video from neil ford. “using nesting tables and spacer images. converted text to graphics made it easier. maintenance might be a problem… but why worry about it. problem with accessibility but it loads fine for me. it’s fine…people making me out as a villain.”

Framed

• when netscape 2 came out.
• showing code example from Microsoft.
• andy clarke misses frames (I think I might, too!)

Their Crimes

• first lynx, then mosaic, then Netscape, and IE.
• another amusing video of Eric doing tech support to make up for his crimes.
• quote from tim berners-lee “Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Brwoser X’ label on a web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days”
• IE kicks the butt of Netscape
• “Rise of the alternative browser”
• the lonely years…
• Box model hack, DOCTYPE Swtich, filters
• Dean Edwards used htc and javascript that repaired everything in IE6.
• WaSP got to sit down with Microsoft.
• Finally, IE7.
• some think we shouldn’t have to be cops of the browsers but we have to fight for it.

• another video from Eric, “in time, I can find closure, I can do more good in the world than I’ve done harm. That’s really what I hope for.”

Your Crimes

• first Scott from Adobe, works on Dreamweaver
• representative from Opera
• Marcus from Microsoft
• Dave Orchard from W3C - hasn’t done enough advocacy
• John Alsopp gave his history
• Dan Sauvé used ActiveX.

There were a few more interesting stories from the audience. All in all, a really engaging start to the day.

Posted by Jonathan on 8/02/07 at 12:28 pm