A List Apart’s Primer is one of the best collection of essential articles on why we should be using the guidelines espoused in Web Standards in our web page development and design. Foundational writings by John Allsop, Jeffrey Zeldman and others are there as are some great examples of applying Standards to page layout and design.
It pays to revisit the past from time to time if only to refresh the ol’ noggin. In our hectic lives it’s easy to find yourself staring at your laptop screen with a teabag in one hand and the phone in the other, asking yourself “What the hell was I doing?” Or, maybe you’re beaten down by your Institutions inherent Vogonic resistance towards adopting Standards, “Tables has been working just fine…,” and you’ve lost your Mojo. A peaceful read of some of these formative pieces can infuse you with some of that CSS vim and vigor you remember having at one point.
The web’s greatest strength, I believe, is often seen as a limitation, as a defect. It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all.
