Working together for standards The Web Standards Project

In a recent post to his blog, John Allsopp of WestCiv, StyleMaster and CSS Samurai fame asks who cares about web standards? The post is a terriffic then-and-now of standards, and does a nice job of summing up the state of browser support circa spring 2004, and has sparked a good deal of discussion. John also puts forward a surprising choice for a potential David to IE’s goliath: the KHTML engine used in Apple’s iTunes. Intriguing though his reasoning is, I suspect Apple has other fish to fry.

More recently, Nigel McFarlane continued the meme—and the discussion—with his own, darker vision of the future of web standards. Despite some embarrassing factual gaffes (Konqueror uses KHTML as its default rendering engine, not Mozilla’s Gecko as Nigel suggests), Nigel’s article is also worth a ponder: are we destined for another round of browser wars? I for one sincerely hope not. The last one caused enough collateral damage, thank you very much.

Yet if we have no standard-bearing saviour on the horizon, and the browser wars are to remain an unpleasant memory, the question remains: whither web standards?

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