Preface to the Third Edition

When my colleagues and I started The Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998, we did not know that valid, semantic markup would make your site’s content attractive to Google. It does, but that’s not what we were concerned about in those pre-Google days. In the late 1990s, a clever web designer was one who could code her client’s site in the five ways necessary to make it work and look right in Netscape 3, Netscape 4, IE3, IE4, and whatever else.

If you wanted your site to do anything besides sit there in Netscape and Microsoft’s 3.0 and 4.0 browsers, you had to author using two generations of two incompatible scripting languages—four incompatible scripts per page in all, and all of them inline. All those inline ...

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