WHATWG – They Know HTML… Don’t They?
Even if you’ve never created a website in your life, you can notice a few major things about the WHATWG’s website.
- Their blog, which is powered by WordPress, is using the default theme with no noticeable changes.
- Their FAQ/Wiki, which is powered by MediaWiki, is using the default theme with no noticeable changes. Even the logo looks like it was thrown in there in a hurry. It’s a nice white square with absolutely no transparency. Five seconds would have made it look much more professional.
- Their forum, which is powered by PHPBB, is using the default theme with no noticeable changes. Once again, they just threw in their logo.
I understand that they would like to rely on a well-tested application rather than a custom build alternative, but can’t they at least make the pages flow together a bit more? It really isn’t that time consuming. I installed and set up this blog (custom theme/widgets/plugins) in one night. So, in 3 nights, they could customize the look and feel of the entire site and make it look less like it was just thrown together. This would help people to take their standard a bit more seriously. Well, that along with ignoring backward compatibility. Just tell people not to use it for 5 years. After the 5 years, browsers should be up-to-date. If they aren’t, I won’t feel bad when people abandon them because their favorite websites don’t work correctly.