After SES San Jose, I read a report from an attendee and published a sarcastic and insulting post...
...then found out I'd been talking through my hat
So I posted a rather necessary retraction and apology
Danny Sullivan was kind enough to take it all in stride and invite me to come participate
So, apologies once more, and thanks to everyone up here for not (justifiably) writing me off as a total jerk
Why Standards?
Web Standards means no proprietary lock-in, wider support base
Page weights can be reduced by at least half, sometimes by even more
Multimedium support and accessibility are much simpler
What about search engines?
Who's Using Standards?
A sampling of a few small organizations...
Microsoft,AOL,Chevrolet,ABC News,Disney Store UK,AT&T,Sprint / Sprint PCS,Kansas City Chiefs,Amnesty International,Los Alamos National Laboratory,and many more...
In addition, there are countless personal sites, academic sites, government organizations, etc., etc.
Bottom line: any site that's interested in improving user experience and reducing maintenance costs should seriously consider Web Standards
What About Incompatibilities?
Some problems do exist, but they're far less of a problem than they were, say, three years ago
The biggest stumbling block is frankly Internet Explorer, but it's only biggest by comparison
Various approaches (e.g. "transitional design") have emerged to help bridge the gap between browser limitations and standards utopia
Sites can realize 90% of the benefits of Web Standards while still maintaining consistent appearance
How Do Standards Help My Users?
Honestly, it's all about the page weight
The #1 factor in page response time is the raw number of bytes shipped over the wire
Users don't care about your markup or how much CSS you use; they do care about how long they have to wait for a page to load
Cutting page weight by 50% means the page takes about half as long to load (on average)
Reduced server load helps, and reduced bandwidth consumption can mean real savings for large sites
Example: ESPN
ESPN.com serves between one half and one billion page views every month, on average
In March 2003, ESPN's home page moved to a Web Standards
Initial page-weight reduction was just over 50KB
Potential bandwidth savings: 720TB (terabytes!) per year
Potential maintenance savings: unknown, but likely significant