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Due to spam attacks I had to password protect editing. The password is the web standard you use to define the presentation of a web site (in uppercase).

Counterarguments

This is the place to collect information about counterarguments to web standard development you have encountered in past dealings with clients. It is important to know how someone ticks before you try to convince them about changing their ways. If possible, link every counterargument to an argument or case study.

Adoption

It's not enough for the cool kids and uber geeks to adopt web standards. Only one of the big 10 sites is standards compliant. Which means, if like so many others, I am to go work for them, using web standards counts for the same as operating a coffee machine.

• "Consumers don't care about web standards it's just a geek thing"
• "Web standards takes longer to do, you are never happy it's done"
• "We can't hire enough people who understand web standards. We don't want all our staff to have to learn to do their jobs"
• "None of our software supports web standards and we don't have time to do everything by hand"
• "Our home grown system/CMS/tool doesn't do web standards and we don't have time/understanding to go back and fix it"
• "Our existing solution does not strongly implement web standards, has received praise and won awards, and received no major complaints. Why fix what isn't broken?"
• "Our old stuff will break if we try and change things, too hard to merge the two"
• "We leave the ready stuff to the browsers and do all the editing and composing by specialised software - who cares if itīs full of crap as long most people can read it?"
• "Google, Amazon, Ebay and myspace don't do it. So why should we?"
• "It just ain't sexy."
• "Prove the ROI to me first."

To answer these counter arguments you could use the report by Sitemorse. All the sites in this survey were FTSE 100? companies and the top ten in the list very successful companies in their own right (J Sainsbury, Aviva, British American Tobacco), showing that there is a clear commitment from the UK's largest corporations to support web standards.