Speakers: Chris Mills

Session

Educating the unwashed masses: improving web standards education and adoption

When you go to a web design/development conference, you are largely preaching to the converted - everyone understands why web standards are the way to go, and knows the big picture. But how do we push the message outside this select audience? Even today, a scarily low number of web sites pass W3C validation.

There are many reasons for this - education in web standards is a very hit and miss affair, many people feel that they don't need to bother with web standards because they can still earn their crust without bothering, there are many hobbyists out there who want to get their content online and don't care how, and corporations are often locked into non-standards-aware infastructures where publishing standards compliant content is hard even if you want to.

To help improve things, many initiatives are being started to provide extensive learning material, course structures and guidance for teaching "the proper web standards way".

In this talk, I will cover all of this stuff. I'll:

• Look at the current state of web standards adoption
• Talk about who doesn't use standards these days, and should
• Discuss strategies to get these groups to make the change, and improve the level of standards adoption
• Look at new web standards educational initiatives, and how they will help
• Talk about what the future will hold for these initiatives

Bio

Chris Mills works for Opera, splitting his time between evangelising Opera's software and web standards, and heading up Opera's developer education activities. This last part includes speaking at conferences, publishing regular web design and development articles on dev.opera.com, and being the creator of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. He is a self-confessed web geek and English language geek, having worked in various geek education roles for the last 8 or 9 years.

Outside of work, Chris is a "heavy metal warrior", playing really fast drums for many bands, including the mighty Conquest of Steel. He lives in grimy Oldham with his lovely girlfriend Kirsty, son Gabriel, baby daughter Elva, and 3 Macs.