I recently had a fascinating conversation with our VP of Client Services. Long story short, I learned that selling web standards is difficult, because many of the benefits it offers are “soft.” For instance, if we tell a client that the extra money we charged them to upgrade their site to web standards will make future updates easier, the Client Services team is afraid the client will come back and say that we should charge them less for updates.
For a standards zealot like myself, this was hard to hear. Like most deciples of Zeldman, when someone asks me why we should use web standards for a site, I go back to the CSS talking points in this article from A List Apart. First, web standards mean dramatically improved accessibility, even degrading gracefully in older browsers that don’t support CSS. Secondly, standards-compliant sites tend to be cheaper to produce and maintain when compared to older table-based layouts, and finally, standards mean that a site is “future-proof” because they will be much easier to maintain and update as time passes and coding standards continue to change.