With the advent of blogging and web design among several of my friends, I thought that some musings on the state of web design would be helpful. Read on for my soapbox.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been initiated on a crash course of desperately trying to “get” weblogs. Along the way, one of the most helpful sites has been Mark Pilgrim’s website which carries an awful lot of technical information and commentary on the absolute-latest in what I’ve taken to calling “web presentation technology.” The key thing about Mark’s site is that he’s desperately concerned with the process of information management and dissemination. Every tweak and change he’s made to his site in the past year has been devoted to making his site as accessible to as many audiences as possible and to make his content as reusable as possible.

As a geek, the philsophy of content reusability is just too appealing to pass up. As a supporter of open source projects such as Linux and Mozilla, the idea of disseminating information to as wide an audience as possible (without discrimination of browser or platform) is commendable. As a technologist, I’m quickly realizing what a lot of other people (including the editors at O’Reilly) have already figured out: Mark is actively exploring the future of web design.

So, what does all of this mean to the web developer? Well, in short, I think it’s time to get away from the idea that web design is just about static graphics and tags. The bias that I had when I worked on dbleads.com for D&B is that everyone who would visit that website would be using Internet Explorer, and that all of those users would experience that website in the exact same way I did. I never considered the possibilities that the content on that site might one day need to be remodeled to fit another schema (which is ironic, because I’ve remodeled that site twice now). Nor did I consider that anyone would be (“stupid enough to be”) using Netscape. And I especially did not consider that a web-spider such as Google’s would care about indexing the site or that someone with disabilities might even want to consider having its contents read to him or her.

As the web continues to mature, it only makes sense that these considerations will have to be addressed. The release of Mozilla 1.0 (which has seen its market share grow rapidly in the last year) and, more recently, Apple’s Safari browser are harbingers of what’s to come. Mark Pilgrim has already dealt extensively with making his site accessible to the Safari browser. Why? Because it currently makes up 15% of his viewing audience. For those of us who will one day own a Mac, this becomes a poignant issue.

The Internet is about disseminating information and a lot of innovation in this space remains to be seen–I haven’t even mentioned XML, RSS, or other non-browser based technologies. While a strict adherance to W3C standards is not a panecea to the question of presentation, there must be a compromise. We must be willing to support a wide variety of technologies if we hope to maintain relevance, even over the next 18 months. That’s what validating pages is about. That’s what will make the difference between watching your audience grow, or becoming just another forgotten corner of the web.

Update: Of course the morning following my rant about standards and accessiblity, poor Mark Pilgrim has to discover that the W3C dropped some of his critical markup technique and have a tantrum.