- An immediate cessation of the use of all presentational <tables> and <font> tags.

- Full withdrawal of Microsoft Internet Explorer and any version of Netscape earlier than 7.x from all occupied PC's.

- A Constitutional Amendment consisting entirely of the upcoming XHTML 2.0 spec.

- A complete redesign of the executive, legislative, and judiciary websites using valid, structural XHTML markup and skinnable CSS layouts.

When Do We Want It?

 Now!

Voices of Giants

"This is where the tide finally turns. This is when we finally get Congress to abolish those <table> tags and spacer GIFs once and for all. WON'T SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE LINK TAGS?!"
- Paulo Ordoveza, founder, M4WeSt

"Never have so many used so many useless tags to achieve so little that could be done in so many more lines of CSS."
- Jesper Wootest, The Swedish Waffle

"It's time to take back America, and take back the Web. I'm marching today for both the children and CSS child selectors."
- Matt Haughey, A.Whole

The web is a mess. We're tired of this deluge of <font> tags, nested tables, spacer GIFs, and broken HTML. We're tired of having to make separate pages for Netscape 4 users and adding "?printable=1" query strings to URLs just to come up with text only output.

We're tired of unclosed tags and unquoted HTML tag attributes. We're tired of <p> used as a line break. We're tired of tables within tables of cellpadding=1 and a bgcolor used just to make single pixel borders. We're tired of numeric permalink anchors which give us validation errors just because the id attribute needs a value that starts with a letter. We're tired of line after line of useless "happy text" web page copy, pushing the real meat of the page below the fold.

We're tired of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

And We're Not Going To Take It Anymore

We're taking this to Washington. We're taking this to Congress. We're taking back the Semantic Web. (Whatever that is.)

Be at the National Mall, Washington, DC, in front of the Capitol Reflecting Pool on 01 Apr 2004 at 10:00 AM. Bring your pickets. Bring your iBooks. Bring food and Pepsi. (And someone bring a really strong wireless range extender antenna or something.) We want to show the movers and shakers of this great country that it could be greater if only every website was required to follow structural, usable, valid, standards-based markup. We want them to know how important web standards are to our nation and to the world!

See you there.

March For Web Standards (M4WeSt) is a group of standards-concerned web professionals who have had enough of nonvalid, noncompliant hypertext markup and are putting their foot down to do something about it. M4WeSt crosses all lines of race, sex, religion, political alignment, or preferred operating system and scripting language. We dream of the day where every HTML tag is closed and terminated, every presentational table cell abolished, every <b> replaced with <strong> and every <i> replaced with <em>, where The Orange Book is our Constitution, the W3 our government, and the wasp our national animal. And with your help, M4WeSt can make that dream a reality. Join us. You must. It is your destiny.