Simon Jessey annouced yesterday the official launch of his Web design company. We were astonished by the volume of information available at his company's site, which includes XHTML and CSS histories, and a glossary of common Web terms.
And it validates.
Speaking of which, we were wholly unsurprised by the results of Tecknetix's recent design challenge, which tested the Web sites of fifteen design firms for compliance to Web standards. Of the fifteen, nine had no doctype, six specified no content encoding, and none validated. Tecknetix sums it up like this:
I'm reminded of a child's riddle -- you are new in town and in need of a haircut. You approach the two barbers in town who happen to have their shops beside each other. One barber is sharply dressed with a million dollar haircut; the other is dressed casually with a ragged haircut. Who do let cut your hair?
Flash or substance - you choose.
Postscript
We'd be remiss not to point to Joel Spolsky's most recent article, The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), which, though not explicitly related to topics discussed above, is worth linking, nonetheless. Enjoy.