The old school developers will remember, and for the new ones, a quick history lesson. In the 1990s, Netscape Navigator (Mozilla rendering engine) was the dominant browser. It “had a few bugs”, and as a result, when Internet Explorer started playing catch-up, there were a lot of reasons to start using IE instead of Netscape. Towards the end of the paradigm shift, we all started doing something deemed unacceptable by todays standards. The dreaded “Your browser is not supported” page.

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A while back (last year, I believe), Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft jointly formed a standards committee for the purpose of developing a sitemap XML standard. The idea is that you list your site’s pages and the crawlers from “the big 3″ will easily be able to index your website. If this seems inviting, it should. There are many advantages to sitemaps. (Read more…)

In a quick summary, I believe so. As Ajaxian points out, the Dutch government has mandated web accessibility for all of it’s sites. In America, our government sites are required to be section 508 compliant, which does bring out a high degree of accessibility (and usability, inherently).

Anyone who knows me understands that I’m a big fan of small government, and a Libertarian. As such I’m not a fan of more laws. However, I think in this situation it’s warranted. If at all possible, everybody should be subject to the same quality of life and the same ability to enjoy conveniences. I would support a bill that would mandate compliance for all corporate websites. In fact, I would eat it up.

What’s your opinion?