This is not an oxymoron anymore :)

I went to the web standards meet up yesterday and that was definitely clear. There were people working on making sites compliant. What is notable and worth showering flowers of praises are the efforts of people in the system (like Lucian and Vanessa) to make sites compliant and lead efforts to create a community of like-minded individuals. Truly, in the service of the people I say!

Also managed to see and speak to Rambling Librarian - and I guiltily thought about how I am no longer painting :(.

Coleman managed to get a “symbol” for web standards - though it might be disagreeable for some. If you don’t comply - you are Hitler, if you are AAA compliant you are Mother Teresa! (you can see where YOU would stand in this good-evil continuum chart).

Nick Pan spoke about how he is using web standards in his company for websites. I later asked him on why there were still some inline styles and some tables - which he told me was part of the CMS which their company had no control of. Thankfully, in my few months of being a designer, I never came across a client using obnoxious CMSes which dont validate!

Also present was Herryanto, the famous creator of BookJetty - Thank YOU for the most useful app ever!

Now, the plan is to meet at least once a month and get things going with regards to standards. Perhaps, it will also be a good idea to bring along clients, partners, etc who have no clue about web standards and spend the first half an hour introducing web standards before we get all technical and start sharing our work!

I will also be attending Russ Weakley’s CSS workshop on Feb 8 as well as BarCamp this saturday. Woot!

I forgot to mention, in the excitement of knowing web standards enthusiasts, about the talk that W3C Michael Smith gave on Opera and web standards - which was pretty basic, but I got to know that Opera will have a firebug replacement this year. YAY! Then I can stop using Firefox already!