I have to disagree with @Martin. Standards are essential to progress. Despite all the differences in the world there are several overarching standards that allow the world to communicate, facilitate transit, and conduct commerce with a degree of efficiency. This is especially true as related to technological mediums, a category into which the Web clearly falls. We need clear, solid, strict, yet comprehensible standards for the Web to grow.

Amen!

The point is: is this a proffesion, or a hobby? Because, if you say it’s the second, then I’ve been wasting my live during the last 11 years (in a proffesional point of view) and hence I and thousands of other proffesionals should start finding a real job. Should we?

What happens is that some of you are confusing the aim of the web itself -the media- with the aim of HTML -the script/programming language- and the rest of web standards. Which are VERY different entities.

The aim of the web should be to be open, close and accesible for everybody.

But the aim of web standards should be to be as powerful as needed to obtain the best results possible, so we, proffesional developers, can make the best possible tools for everybody to publish, and edit all kind of contents. And, of course, mantaining those standards as simple as possible, but not simpler!

Should we worry about my mother not understandig the next HTML generation or CSS 3? Oh, please! We should worry if she would be able to understand them!

Sometimes I think that we are losing completely the focus.

HTML5 aims to change that, and the novelty of simplified, plain english tag names is appealing. However, it seems like a step sideways rather than forward.

Amen too!!

CSS is a design language, its audience is designers.

Nope. CSS is a language to apply design. Your work as a web graphic designer can finish with a PSD, then a XHTML+CSS proffesional can apply your design just as you wanted. The same like your work as a flyer designer finishes with a PSD that you send to printer’s. If you want to learn CSS, that’s great, but not necessarily you need to.

New CSS features just improve and increase the possibilities of the actual CSS, just what we’ve been begging for ages.

Let’s keep making the world a fun and interesting place filled with new and wonderful user experiences, let’s go beyond simple CSS/XHTML hacks, let’s go beyond pretending JavaScript manipulation of page elements is smart programming, lets truly embrace possibility with object oriented, MVC patterned Flex/Flash. You know you want it.

Design is not applying web standards or a reuse of previous created examples, but supplying visual solutions to conceptual problems.

Only a small percentage of the web is actually designed. There is a lot of decoration, but that is not design.

Programmers generally do not understand this, and no amount of intelligent coding prevents them from the failure that is all around us.

If coders were so smart, they would design well too, right?

Keep CSS accessible to designers, and you will have a web worth looking at.

As with many, it was Mr. Zeldman’s readable and largely non-technical DWWS that got me interested in designing for the web. I was able to bridge his “ignorance gap”–I got it. His approach to explaining CSS and HTML enabled me to conceptually map these markup languages to things I understood, and was reasonably good at: visual design and human language. DWWS also obviously appealed to a lot of other Liberal Arts types, people from diverse backgrounds in writing, graphic design, advertising, and the like.

I’ve never done more than cursorily read the specs, instead relying upon my mentors, Zeldman, Meyers, Cederholm, et. al. to interpret these specs into something that I can comprehend. Turning CSS into a programming language will create a barrier to entry for non-programmers. I don’t know what macros and conditionals are–my brain isn’t wired to think like a programmer. I do understand font-weight, margin, list-style, etc., because these concepts map to my world of visual design.

Another aspect of the current crisis over the future of web standards is that academia is just now beginning to embrace web standards in design curricula, as opposed to teaching Flash and Dreamweaver (or not teaching web design at all). A lot of people in the technology fields fail to comprehend how slowly the traditional educational system changes, and how crucial it is to nurture this nascent interest in teaching web standards within traditional design programs. Turning CSS and HTML back over to the CompSci department will eventually kill the kinds of innovations in web design we’ve been enjoying from artists, writers, filmmakers, illustrators, and the other artsy-fartsy types.

Keeping web standards simple isn’t dumbing them down–keeping web standards simple and accessible is essential to keeping them alive.

I couldn’t agree more.