[1]  Declaration of Standards Compliance [7:32m]: [2] | [3] Download (1748)

When in the course of online events, it becomes necessary for web developers to ensure access to the content over which they have so meticulously labored and to assume among the powers and tools available to them, the basic responsibility to ensure proper markup and accessibility, a decent respect for their site's users regardless of their browser, platform, or possible disabilities requires that they should declare their document type for proper page rendering and their assent to basic web standards.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that not all browsers or platforms are created equal, that they are endowed by their creators with certain underlying quirks of behavior, that among these are padding and margin differences, proprietary capabilities, and display limitations.–That to facilitate proper page rendering and accessibility, standards are instituted among web developers deriving their just powers from the consent of the web developer community,–That whenever any form of page content becomes unreasonably inaccessible to site users it is the Responsibility of the Web Developer to alter the page markup and institute new coding, laying its foundation on the declared document type and organizing its structure in such form as shall seem most likely to effect an accessible and properly coded page.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that site coding long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that webmasters are more disposed to suffer while bad code is at all sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the coding methods to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of coding abuses and usurpations pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design inaccessible to users of a site, it is the webmaster's right, it is his duty, to throw off such coding practices and to provide new standards-based coding for the future accessibility of that site.–Such has been the patient sufferance of web developers and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter this former system of coding.

The history of these Former Systems of Coding is a history of repeated standards violations and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny of Bad Coding. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.

• These methods refused assent to standards, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• These methods blocked access to content of immediate and pressing interest, unless, suspended in their inaccessible code, a user should switch to a different browser or install a new piece of software or plugin.
• These methods refused to open content for the accommodation of large groups of people with disabilities, unless those people would relinquish the Right of Dignity by asking someone else to read it for them, a right inestimable to them and formidable only to those of a lazy disposition who might have to do a little something extra.
• These methods forced together pieces of coding and scripting in ways unusual, unaccommodating, and distracting from the content they were meant to showcase, for the sole purpose of showing off some new special effect deemed by the developer to be "really cool."
• These methods obstructed the Right of Content Access by refusing compliance to web standards for establishing accessibility.
• These methods made users dependent on specific browsers and plugins for access to content.

• These methods have combined with the marketing of software companies, plugin manufacturers, and scripting libraries to subject us to a jurisdiction of coding practices foreign to our browsers and unacknowledged by our document types; giving Assent to their Acts of pretended usability:

  • For providing us with inaccessible media experiences.
  • For cutting off members of the disabled community.
  • For imposing unwanted software and plugin requirements upon us.
• These methods have constrained our fellow site users, caught up in the "whizbang" excitement of some new special effect, to turn against other users incapable of accessing that content.

In every stage of these oppressions, users have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: These Repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated coding violations. A Web Developer whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Coding Tyrant, is unfit to be the custodian of that content.

Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our fellow web developers. We have warned them from time to time of problems in their coding preventing accessibility. We have reminded them of the circumstances that prevent some people from being able to access their pages. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the chance to gain more site users to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt their connection to their site's users. Still they have been deaf to the voice of justice and common cause. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces the need for standards, and hold them, as we hold any web developer, Failures in Non-compliance, in Compliance Professionals.

We, therefore, the Web Development Community, in Virtual Congress, Assembled, appealing to the web users of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the Web Developers of the world, solemnly publish and declare, That our Website is, and of Right ought to be Accessible and Standards-based; that it is Absolved of all Allegiance to the Former Systems of Coding, and that all traces of that coding is and ought to be dissolved; and that as Responsible and Professional Coders, we have full Power to write good Code, establish Standards, and all other Acts and Things which Responsible and Professional Coders may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on our knowledge of good coding Practices, we mutually pledge to our users our Common Sense, our Accessible Content, and our Responsibly Designed Websites.

ptvGuy