by Kevin Menzie, CEO

Oftentimes, when I mention “web-standards based design” to a client, they get a glazed look in their eye. I usually have to back that statement up with something like, “It will make the site load faster, make it easily indexible by Google, and will be simple to update going forward.” It’s usually that “G” word that makes people excited about web standards, however, the flexibility that you get stretches far beyond search engine optimization.

Slice of Lime has a collector’s edition Lego box in the office for anyone to sit down and play with when they need to get their creative juices flowing. It occurred to me that the Lego story, and it’s success, can be applied to the web standards story in many ways.

Legos

• Lego started way back in 1934 with bricks made of wood.
• Eleven years later (1945), Lego started making plastic pieces.
• Two years later (1947), Lego started making their famous, standard, interlocking plastic bricks.

Web Standards

• The first publicly available HTML documentation was created in 1991.
• Eight years later (1999), the first Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were published.
• Two years later (2001), W3C authored WCAG 2.0, what we now know as “web standards.”

As you can see, both efforts took the same time frame, roughly 10 years, to land on a standard that lent itself to collaboration and growth.

To set the stage for what why web standards is important, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia’s “Legos” entry:

Lego pieces of all varieties have been, first and foremost, part of a universal system. Despite tremendous variation in the design and purpose of individual pieces over the years, each remains compatible in some way with existing pieces. Lego bricks from 1963 still interlock with those made in 2007, and Lego sets for young children are compatible with those made for teenagers.

So, how does this relate to the web?

As web standards continue to get embraced by browsers, large steps can be made in terms of new technology and innovation.

On the technology front, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can almost universally be used to control the way your website displays on web browsers as well as other devices. With standardization, the once-dormant AJAX (a combination of Javascript, XML, and server-side scripting) is now a familiar term in the land of “Web 2.0″.

On the innovation front, entrepreneurs are finding it’s easier than ever to create ideas without worrying about technology limitations. It’s actually quite the opposite - technology is serving as an enabler. Everything from widgets you can install on your blog to entire platforms such as Facebook or OpenSocial are made possible by the basic building blocks that web standards gives us.

At Slice of Lime, one of the things that’s exciting is that the web feels like a pile of Legos has been dumped in front of all of us. We’re all reaching in and seeing what can be created from these pieces. It’s a time of heavy innovation as we test what’s possible.

After all, six 2×4 Lego bricks of the same color can be put together in 915,103,765 ways - just imagine what we can come up with on the web.

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