The article focus on WHEN you will have to make solutions that do not adhere to standards, due to non-technical requirements. This article do not discuss what is the best solution when building a new website or webapp. What I was trying to do was to understand why only 1/25 adhere to standards. The reason as I see it is way beyond technical standard evangelists and naive approaches to web development.

Building stuff from scratch, websites or webapps, is a no-brainer, and adhering to standards is out-of-the-box for 99% of the frameworks you decide to work with.

Creating a website does not require creating a new piece of technology; you leverage existing systems, e.g. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, DotNetNuke, or just straight static files. You can choose a system like WordPress or Drupal and end up with for free a standards compliant web site.

Done. taken care of… standards-compliant web sites, they’re easy.

Creating a web app is different. This is creating a new piece of technology which requires decisions of tools, processes, requirements, etc. I feel that first, if you choose to create a web app that’s simple and focused (which you should do or no one will use it) and choose tools which are focused, flexible and powerful that don’t try to do everything. Assuming that you’ve made these types of decisions would probably mean you’re experienced in dealing with the opposite environment. I feel then you’d be setting yourself up to create a standards-compliant, open, RESTful web app.

The important thing here is be able to say no, the more features you want to add the worse off you’ll be in all aspects of your web app; no one will use it, you can’t be standards compliant, RESTful API-like app will be extremely difficult, and your tool-set will be massive.

If you can’t create a standards compliant web site in 2008, something is wrong; it’s a given with the top tools for creating a web sites and should be a non-decision.

If you’re building a web app, a simple and focused feature and tool-set will lead a more standards-based result.

Thanks for your comment. I do believe that developers that do not understand and drive business will be outsourced to places where programming is cheap. And I do believe that there is a big difference between a programmer and a developer. If I hire a developer I will expect him to actually help driving business and understand what is important for business. If I hire a programmer, I expect him to write code.