Selling Web Standards 1

Posted by Colin A. Bartlett Wed, 10 Dec 2008 12:16:00 GMT

It’s not often I link to Microsoft but they have an insightful blog post over on the MIX Blog. Molly Holzschlag discusses the business benefits of Web Standards.

For several years, we’ve been pushing standards-compliant sites to our clients and we receive very little resistance. Many of our customers just roll with whatever recommendations we provide, especially for new sites.

But when clients have an existing site, and we try to sell them on converting it into nicely formatted, semantic XHTML and CSS, it can be a challenge. We’ve found it helpful to document clearly for them the additional cost they will incur by having our developers wade through crufty nested tables and horrendous cross-browser compatibility. When laid out in dollars and cents, the decision becomes easier.

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    Joshua Allen 5 days later:
    Thanks for the shout out. We asked Molly to create the recommendations specifically for the edge cases where you get a client who insists that you use a specific technology (particularly MSFT technologies), and then argues that web standards are unnecessary "because MSFT doesn't care about web standards". The point of the Oxite release was to back you up when you tell such clients that A) it is possible to do proper web standards on the MSFT stack, and B) it's what MSFT recommends.
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