Change is the in air in the web development community, you may not like it but it’s happening. If you have spent much time in any forum for designers and developers lately you have probably run into a ‘web standards debate’ (or should that be flame war) or the ‘tables for layout versus CSS positioning debate’. The issues tend to be intertwined, confused and after dividing those with a strong opinion either way into two opposing camps, leave those just starting out and those who were happily unaware of these issues standing around wondering what on earth just happened.

In the old days you would rarely see anything in your logs but Netscape and IE, at one point their usage was about 50/50. There was a general understanding that a good web developer would ensure their site looked the same in both browsers, sometimes going to incredible browser checking, two site building lengths to attain this goal.

Lets fast forward a few years …

You’ve got deadlines piling up and no time to lovingly handcode every page of the monster site that had to be ready yesterday, Dreamweaver is the answer for many developers and teams and it speeds up development time (particularly in a team environment) hugely. But you aspire to valid html, the W3C html validator is in your bookmarks and the top visitor in your referer logs. Can rapid development in Dreamweaver ever result in code that validates?

Your CSS Bores Me writes Chris Casciano at ChunkySoup.net, pondering why CSS designs all look the same.

Its an accusation I hear frequently, along with ‘people only use CSS positioning for personal sites’.

Today’s web developer is being faced with an ever increasing number of browsers and devices used to access their web pages. Alternate devices used by the visually impaired have become higher profile in recent months but devices such as PDAs and Web TV are also on the increase. How is anyone supposed to design and develop pages for this myriad of possibilities?