After several months of careful planning and with some help from Matt, James and Rachel, I sent off the following letter to the editors of both Netguide and Prodesign on the hows and whys I made the table about the netguide awards.
On November 12 the winners of the 2004 NetGuide Awards were announced. A few days later I ran a readily available test to see whether each finalist fully complied with both HTML and CSS specifications. Surprisingly none were fully compliant with both sets of specifications.
Within days of posting these results three of the five blog finalists (bizgirl.blogspot.com, www.publicaddress.net and www.idolblog.com) updated their websites to be fully compliant. To date, no other finalist has updated both their HTML and CSS to be fully compliant with these specifications.
Of real interest are the "Best Government Website" finalists. By 2006 all Government websites must comply with the New Zealand e-government web guidelines and web standards, which require valid HTML and CSS. While the e-government web guidelines aren't perfect, they are set to become the de facto industry standard. HTML and CSS are two of the basic building blocks of web publishing – their specifications are like grammar for web browsers. Much like grammar tells us how to read and interpret a sentence, HTML and CSS tell an Internet browser how to interpret and present content. And while web browsers are mostly very forgiving of badly composed web page code, non-adherence to the specifications may result in the content being incorrectly interpreted and displayed (this is especially problematic for people with disabilities and those who browse the web from alternative devices such as cellphones/PDAs).
When we buy a book we expect the spelling and grammar to be correct. Our expectations for professionally developed websites shouldn't be too different either. The HTML and CSS specifications should be fully complied with to ensure the maximum number of people can access a website correctly. If blog sites, run largely by people in their spare time, can comply fully with these specifications then surely websites designed by professionals should as well.