The principle of having a standards body who will evaluate and approve a uniform series of codes for web building is, in theory, excellent. All web masters will know exactly what they can and cannot use when designing and coding a site.

In theory. Unfortunately the system doesn't work that way - whilst acknowledging that it is impractical for the browser technology developers to unify their display criteria, it is still a problem that what will display perfectly on one browser will look like gobbledy gook on another!

The main problem is the time between a language being submitted to the body and the approval for that language by the body. As soon as something new and vibrant is developed, people will start writing code with it. The result is a permanent game of catch-up.

This synopsis ignores the problems of competing languages, notably C# (see sharp), VB (Visual Basic), .NET (dot net) et al from Microsoft versus Java, DHTML (Dynamic HTML), C++ etc. from Sun and the open source community and XML (eXtensible mark up language) from everybody.

Hopefully we will have a relatively unified set of coding rules for the majority of our work in place before very long. Once the majority of base code is standardised we need only worry about the more esoteric areas, mostly involving graphical display and interpretation. [In my days "Flash" was something you got arrested for.]

It would be nice to construct a piece of Java code and have it work exactly the same in all browsers - always providing that the viewer has Java enabled - or write a Javascript controlled pop-up without having to warn visitors that if they have Java disabled it won't work (let alone "Please turn off your pop-up killer"). These are more the result of a form of security paranoia than any fault of a standards body, but does seem to put some onus on browser and operating system software developers to get their acts together to plug security holes rather than require users to disable portions of their systems.

Here endeth the rant.

All strength to the W3C body as it seems to be working and that helps us all.

For more information and an excellent dictionary of web code and terminology visit: the WWW consortium.

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