"Good enough" is not worth my time, effort or money. Why create it?

I was linked to this article via Andy Rutledge.

I'm going to use Seth's own words here -

I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create a 'good enough website'. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely it can do without mediocrity? If your organization can't build a website that you all agree can serve as a great extension of your brand, you need to stop right now and find a new job.

---

Leave it to the designers. Your website is an extension of your brand, your philosophy. A cheap knockoff will NOT suffice, especially when your competition is just one click away.

What's the point in building yet another average site when there are billions of others out there? Does your business value unique selling points? Wouldn't your business want to be cutting edge and above the competition? Don't you want to make a difference with your brand?

And again, it's not about the font, colour and layout (although all those are important). It's about building a site that is an extension of your philosophy, what differentiates you from your competitors. It's about writing content that pulls readers in effortlessly, compelling them to experience the offline brand. It's about organising your content into logical, easy to access menus. It's about making your ideas shine through the use of semantic markup, so that blind users can still get your message.

Sure, create another mediocre site. Go ahead.

XML, the future?

How semantic are the XHTML tags we have now? h1 isn't descriptive at all - let's face it, a more suitable tag for that would be title. Or article.

XML is a long way off from being a standard, but at least then you can have much more descriptive tags. RSS is a great example of what is possible by using lean, structured markup instead of tag soup.

I guess what we have now is still plagued with CSS flaws (multiple backgrounds? a good multicolumn layout module?) and such documents with 'proper' semantic XML tags will only become reality when we can write XHTML without an excess of division tags.

And only that will happen when Microsoft jump onboard the CSS3 bandwagon, as Apple/Mozilla have already done.

Let's face it, there are some agencies writing sites with divisions as if they were table cells. That's not how web design should work.