What is the state of web development?
What standards are in place for front end web development? It seems to me very few. Other than programming languages and protocols, the land of web development is a free-for-all. I remember 7 years ago I took a media class and the teacher said "Browsers are wider than they are tall, try and use scalable wide layouts". I've also read articles about making a site that is the new version of the web-safe color argument, "better safe than sorry use less than 800 px wide fixed layouts". Years ago it was all about getting the important information above the fold, now with blogs and dozens of posts that is next to impossible. Originally banner adds were ok, then popup ads were the devil and having ads on your pages wasn't always a good thing. Now with discrete text ads that are relevant to the page they aren't overly invasive any more.
My question is, what works for the average viewer. Now the average viewer is different for each site however what do people in general like to see? Dynamic or fixed layout? A wide jam-it-all-in-above-the-fold site? Relevant ads? 800px or 1024px fixed?
Once some of these questions are answered the technical questions start. Should I favor firefox or IE or both? AJAX or pure server side? Lots of javascript goodies or smaller/faster pages? How should the DOM be laid out, lots of divs/spans and CSS or is less more?
And of course the question every custom app developer asks: Can some software do it better?
I am an engineer, not a web developer so some of these questions might be well documented in a graphical design class. However for almost all of the points I've mentioned I've read logical arguments on both sides.
I go back and forth all the time so I figured I'd post on it.
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