Forum Moderators: mack
I want to know what technologies, scripting/programming languages, database developing languages, I should learn, in order to develop or produce web pages that comply with Web Standards and even Accessibility, today and tomorrow?
I already know about CSS and XHTML. But what else? Especially in the area of databases? I heard that ASP.net has lots of problem when it comes to Web Standards, but is PHP any better? Or what the other options? And, of course, generally what are the technologies I should learn in order to really be able to stick to Web Standards, yet also be able to produce web sites that "sell" or that will be bought and admired by clients?
Thanks for anyone taking the time to help and give advice and tips.
The bottom line is that any competant coder can make any scripting language / database combination generate standards compliant code ... the actual choice of scripting language and database will largely depend on your clients and their needs.
Currently I'd say that Apache, PHP and mySQL offer the best general approach to meeting most client needs, although your mileage may vary.
- Tony
I heard that ASP.net has lots of problem when it comes to Web Standards,
The winners make the standards. If ASP.NET emerges as the clear leader in technology, then that will be the standard.
As the above post said, the standards are contained in the output, not the technology used.
When I referred to "standards", I specifically meant the standards that W3C researches and publishes periodically. And putting that mind, every non-newbie online knows that IE from Microsoft has not been covering all the web standards for so long, and unfortunately, is probably the only browser among modern browsers--like Firefox, Opera, and maybe even Netscape--which does not support the newest web standards, or at least displays weird behaviors when it comes to them. However, IE is definitely the winner when it comes to browsers, we all know that. A random guess would say no less than 85% of Internet users, unfortunately, are still using IE, making the lives of developers who want to conform to web standards much harder. Why would the campaign for Firefox be so successful, if not for the frustration of all web-standards advocates out there?
That said, I'm not anti-microsoft at all--I use WinXP & like Xbox, but it did not help Microsoft when IE became and remained the winner, to set the web standards. W3C still sets web standards, and IE still does not comply with many of them, or it at least makes your job much harder as a coder, in order to implement all the features that a client wants in a website, yet still stick to web standards. Maybe I don't know enough about ASP.net, but I know for a fact that many Microsoft products, something as simple as Outlook even, still generates literally deprecated code.
As for ASP.net and web standards, I think this article [webstandards.org] can explain much better the problems of ASP.net when it comes to complying with web standards.
Another example is Macromedia. Macromedia is definitely a winner, but until today, it is not easy to have Flash on your website and still comply with web standards or produce pages that can impress a web-standards aware client, as they go through W3C's validator and get out with 0 erros. You have to implement hacks, even inside the SWF files themselves, in order to make a page that has Flash in it have 0 errors in the validator, and again, IE makes this job much harder than it is with other browsers.
I acknowledge that what I'm saying here would touch a nerve, because whole corporations have to back up and support their technologies. However, those whole corporations should also spend their whole millions on improving the world, and the world wide web for that matter. W3C has been researching and working hard since the mid nineties, and corporations like Microsoft and Macromedia are still not complying with web standards that sound very convincing to many people, especially those concerned with accessibility and a "better" www, a future-proof, truly universal www. I don't work for W3C, I'm a simple web designer, slowly falling in love with web standards and the message or mission behind them. That's all.
