Kilian Valkhof

Dutch Front-end Guild

Today we get to reveal something that has been in the making for quite some time now: a front-end guild specifically for The Netherlands.

PPK of Quirksmode fame has initiated this group with the goal of educating outsiders and making it as easy as possible for them to tell apart a bad front-ender from a good front-ender.

Badly coded websites have been a problem for a very long time, and in the past you never knew in what state the code would be once you got your finished product. Nor did most people care. Luckily, this is starting to change with the Dutch accessibility guidelines and increased awareness of accessibility and usability in general. The only thing missing was an easy way to distinguish between good and bad front-enders.

what does this mean?

To do this, we have set up a number of committees . Perhaps the most important one is the certification committee. That’s right, we will have a possibility to get certificated in the correct use of front-end mark-up.

Next to that, an important committee is the committee Education, of which I am a member. We’re going on a crusade to get web standards into the curriculum of, primarily, the HBO (university of applied sciences) multimedia studies. since I’m actually following one currently, this should be interesting.

For more information, please take a look at the Gilde van Front-Enders (Dutch) website.

The Netherlands is one of the first to start such an initiative, interesting time are coming!