IDEA 20090402 Webstandards China

I just met with Jia Mi from Mozilla Online in China. The other day on the microblogosphere I posted about how there needds to be a webstandards.cn or other site like this because Chinese websites are horribly broken on non-Internet Explorer 6. Seems that in China, with 99% of all software being pirated, windows rules. In a pirated software universe, Microsfoft wins. Those being colonized want to be like the colonizers.

Thus, we developed a strategy for making a website, lets say Webstandards.cn, that will promote education, evangelism and events about the web being standards compliant in China.

After discussion about this wiki and other topics, we decided the best approach is to:


 * Develop this website on our own
 * Then, shop it around for support by Mozilla, Google, and Creative Commons China, and any other projects.
 * Craft an announcement with these supporting groups
 * Launch it big with an event!

This idea is still developing, but the initial thought is to develop a system much like Creative Commons that has some layers of support, along with a button. So, here are three sections right now:


 * xHTML 1.0 + CSS 2 Compliance (or whatever is the current acceptable basic standards)
 * Creative Commons license for user generated content
 * Language compliance for both Chinese and English (this one might be controversial)

Then, develop a button with these 3 or more levels of support to be expressed. Then, this can be placed onto compliant website.

The next steps are to:


 * work on this plan
 * get a domain name
 * get hosting plan
 * meet up with Zafka to talk about (setup a meeting arlready)
 * research
 * what already exists? in USA and China that could be related
 * find a good designer to make a nice chinese cultural interface

Presentation Write-up for BLUG
Webstandards.cn

Many websites in China are broken. They don't validate against the current World Wide Web Consortium recommended standards, support language encoding badly, and don't use widely accepted Creative Commons licenses for user generated content.

A traditional approach in the online English-based communities is to develop a campaign and collect signatures from those who support the action. This type of petition would then be provided to the website operators in order to show them how much people care about a problem. This approach is total FAIL in china.

Accelerating more businesses and developers to promote web standards in China requires a project and strategy that is rooted in guanxi and indirect marketing. By making web standards sexy like Apple products and using some type of public reputation system like Creative Commons licensing approach is the path to success. Site that fit a set of criteria are encouraged to apply a well-designed button to their website show they are part of the elite VIP culture of web standards.

This presentation explains webstandards.cn, who is involved and provides an invitation for all to make their web site standards compliant.

Follow-up
After talking at the Beijing Linux Users Group (BLUG), I'm having second thoughts about this project. More here...


 * http://www.beijinglug.org/en/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
 * http://www.beijinglug.org/en/index.php?option=com_fireboard&Itemid=66&func=showcat&catid=39