Getting ready for tomorrow
Let's face it... This is just the beginning: the Web is still an infant.
And the web is not in a so good shape (very bad coding habits)
- Extremely difficult to maintain compatibility with all browsers and platforms (MSIE/Win, MSIE/Mac, Mozilla's Gecko, KHTML, Apple's WebCore, Opera, text browsers)
- Not accessible to everyone (Braille readers, Screen readers / speech synthesis, navigating without a mouse)
- Internationalization is usually badly indicated (making indexing very difficult)
- Web pages are very difficult to maintain
- Browsers are very complex/bloated to be able to handle existing tag soup (having to replicate rendering bugs in older browsers. Just an example, Mozilla has four rendering modes (Quirks, almost-standards, standards, XML.)
- Very poorly indexable / searchable / machine readable
- Most pages are correctly rendered by accident!!!
We have a unique opportunity to change the web before it's too late.
Preparing the transition to XML / XSLT
Better ability to be indexed by smarter search engines