I’m pleased to announce that I am the latest guest columnist for A Second Voice, Dave Shea’s collection of articles on standards, markup, accessibility, and more.

For those of you who don’t follow such things (hi Mom!), Dave is the caretaker of the CSS Zen Garden, which has quickly become the repository for elegant and modern website design techniques. For this reason, I’m deeply honored that Dave tapped me to write this piece,¹ which grew out of an earlier discussion with Dave and Jacques on creating Bulletproof XHTML. I should note that the previous Second Voice article by Ian Lloyd discusses the importance of promoting web standards out in the workplace, while my article discusses the practical difficulties and considerations in maintaining compliance with these standards. I think the two articles bookend each other nicely, although I get the feeling that Ian is playing Good Cop and I’m playing Bad Cop. Well, we’ll see how this plays out.

1. Particularly considering what a horrible green eyesore my site is. At first I worried that I was going to ruin Dave’s rep as a designer just by association. But then I got over it.