I’m all for [quote] “web standards” as in the website creation philosophy that involves semantic markup and accessibility and such[/quote], but I think its something different than Web Standards as in ONLY using technologies that have come out of the W3C.

@VeoSotano – It’s very easy, with HTML and CSS, to screw up accessibility. More so than most people think. The catch is that it’s much, much easier to do it with Flash.

Also a Flash site can have all sorts of animation, be a immersive experience (as Max Weir described it) and still be very accessible to users. It’s no harder than HTML following some best practices and give images, animations, names (similar to alt), descriptions (similar to longdesc) and a tab order.

“True semantics” should be used to markup content. A computer can do nothing with knowing that something is a list element, or a paragraph. Its the “about what” that is important. It is not at all the same to have a list of links or a shopping list, they mean different things, even if they can be visually represented as lists. Of course, one single language will be never be able to convey the meaning of all representable elements in the world, and that’s where XML and namespaces come in. The really big deal about XHTML is that it is extensible, and new things can be represented in the document even if at the time of the writing of the specification they were not known.

Once you’ve got your document dripping of semantics, it can then be used with any other technology for representation/playback, which doesn’t necessarily have to know on its own how you want that data to be displayed. For example, how many times have you relied on default values of elements in your HTML page, and called it a day? Designers apply style information to almost any element in the page anyway, so why don’t throw ALL the presentational and behavioral stuff out of the window and just use the markup for information — pure data…? And I don’t mean just the “old” presentational stuff… I mean, lists, tables, forms, a’s…. everything! All the content of a web document should be human readable text, marked up with semantic structure, where parts of that structure are identified with namespaces to deambiguate its meaning. Use plain XML.

After we do that, whe have a document that is by itself understandable by both humans and machines, but in a very raw form. This document does nothing to be displayed or represented in any form. We would need a language to define the appearance and behavior of any arbitrary data structure and its contained information. This would need to be new, and I want it to raise the bar to a whole new level: a complete vector graphics rendering engine that is able to display the information without depending at all on the (semantic) structure of the document to do presentation, all with unprecedented capabilities – fonts, gradients, effects, shapes, layout, behavior, etc. To improve accessibility even more, already existing technologies like aural-CSS could be used, but it wouldn’t be so complex, since the document would already be structured in a way that makes sense to the document itself, not the medium where it is finally displayed. Screen readers would have no problems.

WOW, this was long… but coming back to the original topic: I think that there is the posibility for new technologies, that, although they are not Web Standards (yet), use plain-text files for content, where all the information is semantically defined. Then, the final display output mechanism can be the one that provides the best user experience without affecting the ability of search-engine-spiders, screen-readers, etc, to get hold of your content.

Whilst I totally agree with your general sentiment that we shouldn’t get all ‘fanboy-ish’ about ANY subject, I’d come back at you on the above statement: people associate HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript with Web Standards because they ARE standards. Flash, Silverlight, etc. are proprietary technologies, so don’t tend to get included in the ‘standards’ group. And those standard technologies are, on the whole, well-equipped for the production of accessible, usable content.

I think it’s worth switching the angle on this from ‘how hard is it to be accessible using flash’ to ‘how easy is it to be inaccessible using flash’. It’s difficult, using plain HTML and CSS, to really screw around with basic elements like linking, UI controls, and standard behaviour of text. Flash, in my experience, makes it a lot easier. And some people choose to exploit that. And I’ve seen an awful lot of poorly produced flash content that appears evidence of ‘fanboyism’ (hey, cool, I can animate stuff!), more so than with the standard web technologies.

What I’m saying is that I get the feeling that people tend to get behind something so fanatically that they start losing perception of what the real issues are. Because people do not associate “Web Standards” with making sure everybody get’s the equal treatment which is his/her right, they associate it with using HTML5 (the big buzzword), CSS and AJAX. They bash anything that is not the status quo.

I see standards as a big deal. But a different big deal than the big deal of making each and any technology accessible to everyone. Having a platform where every user agent interprets your code in his own way, is a recipe for disaster, so there needs to be an agreement between everybody in the industry.

That being said, you can do something else than what the W3C dictates, as long as you keep accessibility, security, ease of use and compatibility in mind.

@VeoSotano – Web standards isn’t just about the minority of users with disabilities. That’s one component of a larger movement towards making websites easier to maintain, display across browsers, and usable by all (all with a lower price tag).

That said, it is a big deal. Regarding those AJAX web apps? That’s just another form of lazy website creation. There’s plenty of techniques that can be done to make the AJAX content accessible and usable across the board, and there’s advocates for that position. The amount of bad AJAX out there is a sign of the further education on the topic that is needed, rather than a satisfying status quo.

Regardless of whether it’s ‘fashionable’ for standards to be followed, it’s also important in a way that has nothing to do with style. The web is the main platform for communication in the 21st century. Every person on the planet should have the ability to make use of it, just like any person should be able to get inside a business regardless of whether he can walk or has a wheelchair. It may seem like no big deal until it’s you with that experience. If you lost your site today, and suddenly couldn’t use a large number of sites, how would that feel for you?

I get the feeling it is “fashionable” to be for standards, and if you dare to say anything else you get buried into a hole by an angry mob, no matter if there is at least a little truth in it.

Let me make it clear, I dislike Flash as much as the rest of you, but truth be told, it is the best tool to bring an interactive experience online (forgetting about the accessibility issues for a moment). Many companies face the decision of either create an über-fancy interactive online brochure, as a lot of clients certainly demand, and, for budget reasons, just call it a day after that is done; or create “boring” ol’ HTML page (to get the accessibility for free), trying to spice it up a little bit with JavaScript, but of course, since that is a lot harder to do than Flash, just in a limited fashion. For many, the simple idea of create once, play everywhere is too appealing to be bothered with cross-browser compatibility issues. The extra work that then needs to be done to be accessible to minorities is just seen as that, extra work, and posponed for later or even ditched completely.

Darn, if only HTML+CSS were not so limited, or Flash so closed and non-plain-text-ish.