How to Uncover Pseudo-Standardistas

Published on November 20, 2008 (ā†» February 5, 2024), filed under (RSSĀ feed).

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.

Thereā€™s a growing group of developers that doesnā€™t help our attempts for faster, more accessible, more maintainable, and generally quality-oriented web development: pseudo-standardistas. There are several ways to identify pseudos (apart from the hints Henri shared), the easiest being:

  1. Pseudo-standardistas report to be member of standard bodies and organizations like e.g. W3C. However, a non-paper member participating in W3C work will usually have at least one results page of entries when reviewing their work, so try searching Google for contributions on W3C mailing lists. (Searching does work for verifying contributions to other initiatives, too.)

  2. Pseudo-standardistas like to point out how great valid HTML is (it is, even though validation isnā€™t everything). Try validating their site to see if they act accordingly (keep the HTML 5 doctype in mindā€”<!DOCTYPE html>ā€”, which isnā€™t recognized by the WDG and a few other validators).

  3. Pseudo-standardistas make maintainability mistakes like working with presentational ID and class names, and using (maybe even recommending) Conditional Comments or multiple style sheet references in the markup. This is a tough call (not everyone will appreciate this) and surely an advanced requirement (many peers donā€™t find it problematic to link to several style sheets out of their pagesā€™ markup), but still a red flag when it comes to maintainability.

There are more telltales of pseudo-advocates of modern web development (I feel reminded of ā€œvalid this or thatā€ badges), but at least in German-speaking countries thereā€™s an awkward tendency to rest on laurels not deserved yet. I donā€™t mind decisive self-promotion and marketing (heck, itā€™s Europeā€™s small answer to Barack Obama writing this post), but we need to ask ourselves if thatā€™s in the best interest of our industry.

Toot about this?

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

Iā€™m Jens, and Iā€™m an engineering lead and author. Iā€™ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google, Iā€™m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for Oā€™Reilly and Frontend Dogma. I love trying things, not only in web development, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views andĀ experiences.

If you have a question or suggestion about what I write, please leave a comment (where applicable) or aĀ message.

Comments (Closed)

  1. On November 20, 2008, 21:44 CET, Duluoz said:

    Have you ever heard the term armchair quarterback? These are typically individuals who might have, or not, played some high school football, who think they can do better than the quarterbacks they watch on TV in their recliners. Perhaps there is such a thing as armchair standardistas?

  2. On November 24, 2008, 12:55 CET, Jens Oliver Meiert said:

    David, no, unfortunately not! I like ā€œarmchair standardistaā€! šŸ˜‚

  3. On November 27, 2008, 15:03 CET, Christophe Strobbe said:

    Regarding point 1: (a) the mailing lists of some working groups are not public; (b) some other contributions have no public visibility, e.g. filling in questionnaires through the W3Cā€™s WBS; (c) when searching mail archives, check that those mails donā€™t just say ā€œregretsā€ (in response to the announcement of a conference call): some people seem to send more ā€œregretsā€ mails than anything else but donā€™t want to give up working group ā€œparticipationā€ because it looks nice on their CVs (and book announcements).