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Do You Care if Your Website is W3C Compliant?
eldavojohn wonders: " Do W3C standards hold any importance to anyone and if so, why? When you finish a website, do you run it to the validator to laugh and take bets, or do you e-mail the results to the office intern and tell him/her to get to work? Since Opera 9 is the only browser to pass the ACID2 test, is strict compliance really necessary?" We all know that standards are important, but there has always been a distance between what is put forth by the W3C and what we get from our browsers. Microsoft has yet to release a browser that comes close to supporting standards (and it remains to be seen if IE7 will change this). Mozilla, although supportive, is still a ways from ACID2 compliance. Web developers are therefore faced with a difficult decision: do they develop their content to the standards, or to the browsers that will render it? As web developers (or the manager of web developers), what decisions did you made on your projects?
Update: 05/20 by C : rgmisra provides a minor correction to the information provided. It is stated above that Opera9 is the only browser to pass the ACID2 test, however "This is not true - Safari was the first released publicly released browser to pass the ACID2 tests." -- Sorry about the mistake.
In theory, whatever works in theory works in practice. In practice, this is not always the case.
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For commercial sites, it's all about ROI. So your PHB is unlikely to approve any spending unless you can prove significant loss of sales as a result of non-compliance.
On the other hand, if I'm building a site in my spare time, and it's targetted at Slashdot audience, I would be very careful with all the standards because (1) I can approve my own time and (2) I am more concerned about peers' feedback than ROI.
I guess it's the humanization of the site that makes you care about compliance.
Please stop entering code 2,2,7,6,6,4
IIRC, Opera 9 is not the only compliant browser. I believe Safari 2 is also compliant.
I validate every page.
When you write a program, your compiler or interperter will tell you when you fuck up. When you write a website, your browser tries its best not to tell you when a page is fucked up.
It's a supremely bad idea to rely on whether a browser can display your site to determine whether it is designed correctly or not. Even the next version of the same browser might do something unpredictably different with your tag soup.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If it's my own personal site, I want it compliant. Must be the OCD in my family, but I also feel like if you "compile" the site it should return with no errors.
If it's for work, I'll get it done so it works in IE and Firefox. I'm not getting paid for adhering to the standards, and writing a standards-based site that will look right in freaking IE takes longer than it's worth.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Websites? Mostly. Intranets? Screw it.
A standard compliant website more or less guarantees that your website will work atleast decently now, tomorrow and in the far future. A non-standard with hacks might just aswell not render at all in 4 years.
I'm not religious about it, but I try to make it as compliant as possible as I go, run your pages thru the validator a couple of times and you'll pick up your errors quite quickly.
Nowadays, about 60-70% of my pages validates automaticlly on the first try.
I do. However, neither my employer nor the guy who has a long-term contract to develop our website have any idea what web standards are. For them, if it works in IE then it's "standards compliant." Thankfully I've been making progress (in teensy tiny little chunks) with my boss over the past two years...
This guy's the limit!
Because the W3C validator doubles as a good error-checker. If the W3C validator rejects my page, then chances are I will have display problems of some sort on some browser I haven't tested yet.
Unfortunately the contrapositive is not true, if the W3C validator accepts my page then there is no guarantee I will avoid display problems. But it's a good first step.
For what it's worth, I just ran the Acid2 test through Safari and it passed.
This very topic is the source of a constant argument between me and my boss. I work to make our product adhere to the standard, even if it means leaving out some nifty interface tweak. My boss wants me to *strive* for IE-only.
When I design and code a site, I do it by hand (usually vim or kate) and when I'm done, I always run it through the W3C validator to make sure I didn't leave out a closing or some syntactical error somewhere.
Some people are obsessive about being W3C compliant and do it pretty much just so they can 'show off' the w3c comliant badge. I do it to make sure I didn't make any coding mistakes.
This validation happens to have the nice side effect of making a site render correctly in most decent browsers.
"I filter at +6, and have yet to miss out on an important comment." (#822545)
As long as every browser shows it properly. There are quite a few times that being W3C compliant doesn't display properly in every browser (Hello Microsoft, you reading this? Please pay attention as there will be a quiz on this later).
Overall, I don't think W3C is the end all of web design, however. Even firefox was having a hard time rendering the W3C test page properly. However it does help make sure everything works, and then you can hack the code to fix bugs for broken (ie) browsers. The closer you can be to W3C the better you are over all for long term.
Write once, test everywhere.
The article's webpage breaks if you change the text size in your browser.
Ok, so maybe not so much "ironic", but considering the topic, that is pretty damned funny... or sad, depending on your perspective.
The latest release of Konqueror (3.5.2) does not incorrectly show scrollbars, so it "actually" passes.
Despite the lack of support you get for all the w3c standards I find it is a good place to start to check your work.
Using the validator checks your syntax while it checks compliance. Once you have error free markup you can decide from there if changing your content to comply with some standard is worth it. For simple things it usually won't make a difference in most browsers. And if some tricky bit of markup that makes your page look just right in IE or whatever your target browser is and it's not compliant it's probably not a big deal.
For the most part though I find if I write to the standards first and make exceptions only when absolutely necessary my pages will look good in just about any browser. But maybe that's just me, I am also not a fan of using flash, heavy javascript or just about anything else other then html and css.
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I know that my code isn't compliant with XHTML standards and I'm sure I do things which ARE NOT standardized but often help with cross browser issues.
As such, 90% compliance should be achieved by all code. People who code to a non-standard better be ok with Firefox and Safari users bitching all the time.
I myself prefer Firefox so by coding to Firefox, I can pretty much gurantee a high level of compliance and cross browser compatibility.
All in all, I stress cross browser compatibility above w3C compliance. But often the two are the same.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I suspect that most people write for their favorite browser, then test with alternatives and hack the code to make it work.
Pretty poor practice, but likely the norm.
I'm overseeing a web site redesign right now for client whose members are largely Mac users.
The coding crew hired by the designers are working with Internet Explorer though, so nearly every feature and many design choices need to be fixed so that the site will work for our Safari users. Or even non-current versions of Safari.
We specified from the beginning that everything on the site be platform and browser neutral, and are becoming somewhat unpopular for continually saying "But it doesn't work in Safari..."
Ulitmately what is needed is for clients of web design firms to demand that all work be compatible with at least Safari, IE, Mozilla, and Opera. Only then will designers create sites that are cross compatible from the beginning, instead of "fixing" thinsgs after the fact.
Three Squirrels
No, I don't care. The validator is a mechanical tool. It's inherently flawed, understanding nothing of semantics, easily tricked into validating things which never should validate, and in a number of cases throwing incorrect warnings and errors. Having your website validate is a first step. A guideline to doing things the right way. It's not completely necessary. The <canvas> element (as specified by the WHATWG, and implemented by Opera, Mozilla/Firefox/SeaMonkey and Safari (I'm reasonably certain)) will cause errors to be thrown, yet one can imagine cases where its use is already perfectly acceptable. (Just as long as you don't use it on a client website, or at least not without full understanding of the implications by the people there of using something which can change out from under them at any moment, and their responsibility to track those changes.)
Yes, I care. I'm a professional web developer. Of course my website validates, besides also being completely accessible and being as semantically meaningful as it can possibly be. It's just a little showcase of my technical expertise. And yes, I care, as in: if you as a fledging web developer come to me on IRC or on some mailinglist for help with your website, you'd better be damned certain that your website validates before bothering with me, as I'm not going to spend any time on what would otherwise almost certainly turn out to be a problem caused by your invalid code.
Those two points made: wow, what's with the harping on ACID 2? Yes, it's a nice test to spur browser makers on to come closer to being perfectly interoperable, but it tests a pretty arbitrary range of rendering bugs, and all browsers save for IE are pretty much interoperale on it at this point. (Firefox only on the reflow branch, to be sure, but that's set to land Real Soon Now, and as has been explained often, ACID 2 came at the worst possible time in the Mozilla development cycle.
I try to both be standards compliant, and work on all browsers as well. I do sites for myself and friends in XHTML + CSS and so far my biggest challenge has been making things work correctly in all browsers, and still maintaining compliance since every browser has varying levels of compliance. So far i've been victorious, however one thing I can say about standards compliance, is that the current browser wars always have some tidbit about somebody being more compliant than somebody else. At least by using compliant code while still coding to browsers as well, I can be sure that while qwirks are worked out of the browsers, my sites will at least still look correct with the least maintainance. I've been happy with the results so far, so I have no reason to complain.
Standards? That's what web is about isn't it? We need interoperability, and the best way to achieve it is by standards. And it's not too difficult to make you're sites validate. Then add the necessary workarounds for IE and other "not quite there yet" -browsers and you will end up having a decent site.
nope.
What people need to stop doing is comparing how a browser renders the Acid2 test to its compliance with web standards. If you bother to read the Acid2 page, you'll see that its purpose is to see how a browser renders INCORRECT code.
To me, compliance is very important. Not only can you be sure that it will render properly in every proper, compliant browser, but it will also be easy to add on to and change stuff.
Besides, as long as you aren't trying to jump through IE css-fix hoops, compliance is usually as easy as encasing all of your variables with quotes.
mattdev@server$ touch
cannot touch `/dev/genitals': Permission denied
Reposted from something I wrote a while ago
There are very few good reasons these days to write invalid code. Mostly it's just ignorance and apathy that causes people to write invalid code.
Last time I looked, there was no way of embedding Flash in a page that validates and actually works in most browsers. Therefore, I gave up on validation.
(oh and just because lots of sites and ads do annoying things with Flash, please don't assume that I do... like any tool it can be used or misused.)
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Konqueror 3.5.2 is also displaying it perfectly.
And to answer any doubters - no, there is not a scroll bar. (as per usuall complaints)
To answer the original question, yes I do code to W3C. Mostly so I don't end up in an eternal "chase the latest bug" problem others run into when new browsers appear, or even just new versions.
Of course there are some compliant pages that refuse to render right in one or two browsers on the first pass, but debugging them against various browsers is alot easier than getting an IE web page to render correct in firefox, for example.
Is a fool who doesn't deserve to be involved in web development.
The Web would never have been much more than an academic experiment without web standards. Anything that has a sufficiently large group of people that use it at various levels needs standards. Think road traffic is bad now? Imagine if there were no lines on the roads, no standardised street signs, or even pavement. Getting anywhere would be total chaos, and most of us would be doing it on foot.
Sure, Opera 9 is the only browser released for public use that passes acid2, but the Gecko codebase achieved this a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, we'll likely have to wait for Firefox 3 in order to experience it.
IE7b2 is complete as far as standards compliance is concerned, so you might as well go ahead and test it now. It still has the worst compliance compared to all other non-MS browsers.
The distance between any W3C recommendation and the browsers is a result of 2 things: vagueness in the document, and how any browser vendor decides to interpret it (if at all).
The biggest threats to web standards aren't MS, WHATWG, Motorola, or any other entity.
Number one: Quirks Mode. As long as browsers try to correct invalid documents, there is not real incentive for valid documents to be produced. Interoperability can't be fully achieved, and machine-to-machine exchange of data remains tenuous.
Number two: Nomenclature and Authority. Part of the W3C's problem is the terms they use to identify the stages of a standard. "Draft" is understandable, but labeling a final document "Recommendation" almost begs people to ignore it at will. Furthermore, the W3C just produces documents, and there is no body anywhere to monitor and enforce standards compliance among browser vendors. I believe the W3C should be absorbed into an existing technical organization which people actually respect, probably IEEE.
Anyone who doesn't care about web standards might as well go back to 1998-99 and try to keep riding the bubble.
I run my own indie web design business (targeting artists and musicians), and also do web design through my full time job (local newspaper - we do contracted web design, too). I make sure that ALL my clients' sites are HTML 4.01 Strict compliant (Or XHTML Strict), and work hard to make them at least functionional for people using TTS readers and text-mode browsers. When it comes to rendering for IE, I usually specify a second IE-only stylesheet.
Once standards compliant, I test in all major browsers, plus lesser used ones. I make sure each site is at least functional, if not exactly what it should be.
I tell you what, it is hell trying to get people to understand why standards compliance is important. They always seem to say "but this works, doesn't it?" - I hate that. Sure, it works NOW, but the code is bloated, it is useless in TTS readers, and it may not always render properly.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
I've never much been one for standards compliance in the past. I designed for the best browser around (mostly Netscape at the time) and didn't look back. Then again, I was a newbie then.
These days I'm trying to go standards-based but the simple fact is that CSS is powerful and thus complex. The fact that various browsers interpret it differently is a major PITA as well. I've been trying especially hard to eliminate tables and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it's a stupid idea, because CSS just doesn't seem to behave as it is supposed to on any browser.
So basically, I do as much standards compliance as I can do fairly easily, and my overall layout both on the work website and my home website is completely CSS-based with no tables. There are still some tables on the work website because until I go to dynamic content on those pages I'm not going to CSS because I don't want to have to maintain the annoying CSS that will replace the tables, I want it to be autogenerated.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would like to ask a follow-up question: Do the replacement of tables with div-elements really help anybody (besides giving job security to web developers)?
Note that I am not at all against css. But I just find the table-tag very usefull for layout. If you need to do a three-column layout it will be much easier and give cleaner code to just use a table, than to use one of the many css "hacks" needed to give the wanted result in most browsers. If you want the layout to do something "extra" (eg. "make the center column 400px wide, but allow it to grow if the cell contains a wide image, pushing the right column") it will (probably) be impossible using divs, but trivial using tables.
One reason to not use tables, that is usally given, is that tables should only be used to tabular data and not for layout, as to not create problems for blind users. But just an empty alt-attribte on an image signals to the user-agent that the image is for layout only, a empty summary -attribute on a table could for example be used to signal that the table is for layout only. My guess is that, that convension would be much easier for user agent implementors to use that to parse through all of the css hacks. I also feel that it would be semanticly much cleaner to have a table with one row and three cells than to have three or four divs nested and floated in strange ways.
because those are my default browsers.
If it's flash, it's really annoying, especially those auto-follow-the-mouse-show-teardown ones that don't let my move my mouse around, which really annoys me as I have multiple tabs open and I hate the advertisers who do that and will never buy their products.
So, no, I don't actually care if it's W3C compliant, so long as it works with both browsers - I use Opera for email and Firefox to surf the web for news and sites.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I care, but unfortunately certain browser developers don't give a rat's ass, so attempting to get a page to render perfectly in ALL major browsers without being ultra-conservative and without having to rely on browser hacks like quirks mode or conditional comments is not an easy task.
Furthermore, many open source projects generate HTML output that is so far from compliant that it's easier to just give up and rely on quirks and conditional comments to make things work, in comparison to spending the many man-weeks it would take to fix rendering problem of the various modules and plugins one would often use in conjunction with those projects.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
In practice - our main website actually doesn't validate! Our (proprietary) content management system munges code, so that even if I enter valid xhtml, it doesn't come out valid at all. This should be fixed in the next update hopefully... although even then it will take a huge overhaul to bring our vast website into 100% standards compliance. Until then, at least all our non-CMS microsites are valid. I've also helped persuade them to use Plone as the basis for our new intranet, partly because it adheres to pretty much every web standard under the sun.
Even if they didn't have this policy (and outside work, where I'm under no such direction), I still care. Why? Well... hmmm... frankly, I think it's about a typical geek trait as much as anything. Confused?
Basically, although one could reel off the supposed reasons why standards are all good (cross browser rendering, accessibility, etc), but there are counter-arguments to these anyway. (Cross browser rendering? Barely any browsers REALLY support all the standards, and the hugely dominant one doesn't do so at all. So the pragmatist could argue standards aren't the de facto route to platform-independent equivalent rendering. Accesibility? It's doubtless possible to follow standards and be inaccessible, and vice versa...)
No, if anything, the real reason I love sticking to standards is that good old geek habit of enjoying a challenge. Let's face it - it's easy to make a site that looks good in one browser and sucks in the rest. It's easy to make a site that looks good if you just do the whole bastard thing in flash. It's easy to make a site that looks good across all browsers if you ignore the standards and fill your markup and CSS with hacks. But make a site that looks good across all browsers, using the onion skin of gracefully degrading web technologies (Server side language of choice->XHTML->CSS->JS) and nothing more, and all 100% standards compliant?
Now that's a real challenge ;-)
I'd link you to my employer's site, or some of the standards-based microsites I've done, but it's a charity, and I don't want to land them with a bandwidth bill :-)
I'm almost OCD when writing sites to be at least HTML 4.0 transitional, and if I have a few minutes to kill I go for HTML 4.0 strict or XHTML 1.1 strict.
Yes I'm retarded, but I just don't feel like I have fully completed a public facing page until it is compliant.
My ISP tells me that sites that are compliant rank higher in searches. That would be a powerful reason to comply. Is he right?
Surprisingly, I both do and don't care.
:)
My current project uses the name="" parameter inside of tags, which isn't part of the standard, but is surprisingly useful anyway.
I also make use of the _ trick for dealing with IE's boneheaded CSS.. which definitely doesn't validate.
Take those two out, and everything does validate. It's not great, but it does work nicely on IE, Moz, Opera, and Safari, which impresses me nicely.
The answer for me is yes and no. IMO, it's a very useful tool when developing a website/webapp/whatever. That said, in the Real World, there are more important things than validation. (/me carefully glances around for standards zealots.) Stuff like semantics, security, and accessibility. It makes me sad to see a "valid" site loaded with crappy '90s DHTML, layout tables, and a bunch bad alt attributes. I'd much rather see a good, modern site that happens to have a few validation errors.
Ironically, I only validate my hobby site for XHTML/CSS2 strict compliance. I like to pretend that it keeps me on my toes. However, I don't actually design any of the sites I work on at my job, and they're done entirely in Visual Studio, which makes them entirely unfriendly to standards. I realize this is a lame excuse, but it is far too time consuming, and our clients generally do not care. I obviously am aware of all the benefits, given the attention I've paid compliance via my large-ish hobby sites, but there's not enough motivation to adhere to that in our developing environment. I might as well add that my happy-go-fun sites run PHP/Perl/MySQL on Apache, and the sites I get paid for run asp.net on IIS.
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A lot of stuff has changed since then. My site has a new URL, it now carries a basic doctype and a lone meta tag.
I've developed my ideas a lot since then, through discussion about this issue on Slashdot, coincidentally, but my overall opinion is still that if the HTML is of a good quality and it renders right in about half a dozen major browsers, my job is done. My opinion of standards is that they aren't black and white. There are two layers to almost every rule and standard: the beautiful theoretical layer, and the beaten and twisted practical layer. My 'validators' are the very programs people will use to view my work. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Konqueror and so on.
I think people like the W3C validator because it pats them on the back and gives them big green 'YOU WIN' feedback. It's a way to have something tell you that you made a good site without taking into account the content and aesthetics, which for some people is a crutch.
Obviously there's a balance between these two sides, one which I have yet to reach. My experience is that the real experts don't tend to have extreme views on stuff like this. An extreme view impairs your ability to know when to use the tool for its intended purpose.
Some people will do the typical Slashdot thing with this, which is to take everything you disagree with as a sign that the person who said it is evil or a dickhead. The reality is that there are different kinds of pathetic nerd. Some enjoy the inital creation almost exclusively, and others get equal enjoyment out of the refining stage at the end. I'm the first kind, the typical lazy programmer who prefers writing cool new features to debugging. So please take a deep breath if you're thinking of singling me out as the cause of all evil in society.
More important is being able to render actual pages.
But if a CSS engine can render Acid2 correctly without including a lot of Acid2-specific bullshit hacks, then it is more likely to be able to interpret standards-conforming web pages correctly.
i try to apply the standards first. if that doesn't work (obssessive/compulsive website owner wants top and bottoms exactly aligned with top and bottoms of images) then i go with deprecated standards.
-- and if life has failed you leave the cross you're nailed to
On my Ruby on Rails sites, every (changed) page is automatically re-validated every time I make any change that would affect a page.
(I use the assert_valid_markup or assert_valid_asset plugin)
I make sure that ALL my clients' sites are HTML 4.01 Strict compliant
So what do you do when you want to start an ordered list at a value other than 1? Example: the track listing of the album Follow the Leader by Korn that must start at 13, or top 10 lists that must start at 10 and step by -1. In HTML 4.01 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Transitional, the deprecated value attribute of the li element does this, but like other deprecated elements, it's not present in Strict. How do you work around this? Until IE supports CSS counters, which are the W3C's official alternative to li value, user agents are still in the HTML 4.01 Transition.
Or have you carefully worded everything in your clients' web sites to avoid having to create such a list?
but I don't think W3C qualifies as a "standard" - it's simply a guideline at this point, and as much as we all might like it to evolve into a true standard, it doesn't qualify when only one or two obscure browsers properly support it. Granted, IE's marketshare has fallen in recent years, but it still boasts a claim to well over 80% of the browser market, and as long as it maintains such a vast lead, IE compliance IS the standard whether we like it or not.
;).
Flame on, but remember that I am on your side here - just more of a realist
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
How I write web pages (and web applications): Code it, open in Opera, look for obvious errors, hit Ctrl-Alt-V to validate the page using the W3C validator. If W3C says the page is valid HTML, my work on that page is done. Else, fix what the validator marks as wrong. If a browser can't render the final page properly, the browser is broken, not my page. I don't have to test my page for hours with a heap of browsers, some quick validator runs are all I need.
No, I'm not a web designer. I prefer pages that can be scaled up and down using the browser settings, as preferred by the user. I prefer simple, formatted text (simple HTML, perhaps without CSS) to webpages that torture the browser into a pixel resolution grid. Those pages are easily written, easily validated, easily rendered, and look pretty good in all browsers.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
I just finished work on a website. I decided to make it completely XHTML and CSS compliant. And to my shock and horror... it rendered perfectly in every browser I tried! (note: did not and will not try IE) So from now on, I'm definitely coding to the standards.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Yes. A browser passing ACID2 is much different than XHTML being actual XHTML.
I write nice valid code for Firefox, then mangle it for IE, the only time I had to break standards for FF was on some kind of image map name thingie.
/. forbidding the validator?
Now why is
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
All the end user cares about is if it displays correctly in their browser.
Screw standards and do browser based testing.
If you want to do both, fine, but its a waste of money.
However, you should use CSS because from a design perspective it is easier and reduces duplication.
Who really cares about the W3C anymore?
The article talks so much about how not supporting multiple devices and such will slash your market share. He's obviously either academic or on one of those lame standards committees. How much business do I really lose because all 20 of the Palm Pilot surfers don't visit my site? It has ZERO impact to my business and I could care less about those users.
And, almost by definition, standards are 1-3 YEARS behind technology so embrace as needed, but don't let them hold you hostage.
What the hell, why do I have to worry about this crap? English, which has WAY less defined grammar rules, can still be decently parsed by MS Word and display a squiggly green underline under the sentences that don't work right.
Where is my free, lightweight, W3C editor with a squiggly green underline?
Without a doubt, I try to make every webpage I design that is more than just a quick test script comply, at the very least, with one of the X/HTML doctypes - whether it's transitional or strict. I do this at work & at home, on my own personal projects. Naturally, you're limited with what you can do when you have to design for IE, but that's called the "Real World". I'm blessed at work to have co-workers that agree with this, for the most part. Sadly, our working code base is not compliant, but you do what you can.
The best point I saw mentioned above was that compliance is the best bet that what you make work on a website now will also work in the future. If you design for one particular platform or agent, then you'll be out of luck if that changes. This is really only a discussion for someone who is shortsighted - along the same lines of reasoning as the ones that think 1GB of RAM is more than you'll even need & you'll never fill up those new 750GB hard drives. Sadly, human beings are far better at seeing what they've already passed than what is coming up, and don't seem to be able to extrapolate from that.
Standards-compliance is one of those good design practices that carries with it the lessons learned from the past. Coupling it with separation of presentation & content (e.g., XHTML & CSS), a standards-compliant website ends up being really nice.
But, the vast majority of otherwise intelligent developers will probably succumb to the ideology of instant gratification & short-term gains - "I did it in five minutes!" - "It works on 90% of people's computers". This is the same flock that doesn't leave comments in their code & think no one else needs to understand it after it's done - including themselves!
Kindness is not to be found in anything but that it adds to its beauty...
Title says it all.
It may not be 100% perfect, but it's damn good.
Write the code with a text editor, then check the page with Firefox and the ext. Most of the time IE is damn close to working (IE6 anyway), the way Firefox does.
Caveat - I am not a pro designer, and do not use heavy javascript, and only moderate amounts of CSS.
Check OSWD for compliant designs, and use them as a base. This saves me lots of time (once again, I'm not a pro designer).
What's On Your Network ??? http://www.open-audit.org/
Hell yes!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I design and code my sites in Visual Studio; though the ASP.NET C# code generates additional HTML that can't be checked from within VS2005. I try to keep that part as close to W3C as possible, but sometimes compliance just makes it harder to get things done. The CSS validates, usually... The biggest problem I see is alot of web hosts add non-compliant tracking code to each page.
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N-O means no.
Thanks!
This is not a troll. For most businesses out there there is only one standard... IE. I hate to say that, but it's true. I run a small business with a website. It's not a technical business, just a boring store like you may see in any mall. Are customers are ordinary middle class people. Our website got 729 hits last week. 684 from IE (only 659 from IE6!) 22 from Fire Fox. 17 from Safari. 2 each from Opera & Netscape. One each from Konqueror & Mozilla. So, if it looks good in IE and is passible in Firefox and Safari then we're done. I know that 99% of my customers can see what they need and we really can't afford the extra budget to satisfy the remaining 1%. W3C Complaint? I can't afford to care.
I edit my html in vi, and view it in IE. If it looks good, its done.
This works for all of our internal 'dashboard' and utility websites that we run in-house. I work for $LARGE_US_BANK.
Note: I have nothing to do whatsoever with our externally facing "online banking" site.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
On a more serious note, the only way to solve the problem is to have browsers shame non-complient pages. Specifically, if IE7 displayed a dialog that said, "This web site is constructed improperly and might not work as expected" every time it hit an invalid page, things would change VERY FAST.
No, I will not work for your startup
Since I'm working for the Government of Canada, I have no other choice. It's not a bad thing really. Just install the Web Developer extension for Firefox and you're halfway there. It got shortcuts to validate the HTML and accessibility checkpoints. You'll just have to spend a couple of minutes extra per page to make them compliant with Treasury Board's guidelines (which pretty much follows W3C). The good part is that once all the compliancy checks have done, you know that visually impaired people have a slightly easier time to read your page with JAWS or whatever screen reader they're using. You can of course mess them up by nesting multiple tables.
I remember the first time I heard about the validation service. My entire homepage, which was then a collection of static HTML pages, was a horrible mess. So what did I do? I went through every single page and re-wrote it until it was HTML 4.01 Strict. Then as soon as I heard about XHTML and realized how much better it was, you guessed – re-did the entire thing as XHTML 1.1.
Personally, there's two other things I like to pay attention to when designing a page: Make sure that all the layout is done in CSS, and use as little JavaScript as possible. My rule of thumb as far as Web sites go: If I can't see anything in Lynx, it's not worth my time. And yes, I am a Lynx addict.
These days I've got everything on my site managed with a homebrew content management system, Überpage. The first thing I did when designing it was make sure it used exclusively valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS code.
By the way, timing on this story's pretty convenient, because I just finished revising a page about designing good Web sites on my homepage, too... you'll have to forgive the stupid URL (html.html), most of the stuff on my site's been there for years, and because I've got so many links all over the place it would be suicide to change the URL's yet again...
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
Likewise, anyone who can read and understand English can comprehend what we're all writing here, while not much of the text may be up to the standards of the Queen's English.
Who cares?
seriously, what possible need do 99.999999% of websites need for more than simple table tags, headers, list items, and fonts? navigation bars belong in frames or in a column of a table. Yeah has been around a while, but really, all this CSS and XHTML is a total waste of time and energy. websites are supposed to be stupidly simple. maybe a couple of graphics to spice things up a touch but that's it. And I fscking HATE script languages! If the page won't work right with javascript totally disabled, then IMO you should be drawn and quartered and your head stuck on a pike.
what I do is to view the pages I created in all the major browsers in both winxp and linux using different window sizes. If they look good, I leave them alone. If it does not work in one browser I will fix it.
Isn't Acid2 a test on how a browser handles errors? If all browsers handled errors the same way, then couldn't some errors end up turning into standards?
Acid2 feels like a step in the right and wrong direction at the same time.
i'm working with xml and client-side xslt to render xhtml output on the client browser
it's almost impossible to make nonstandard code this way
the irony is that firefox and ie have no problems with this, while opera doesn't support xslt transforms at all
so the most compliant standard browser isn't up to snuff with the most compliant type of code methodology
(which, in a way, makes sense, because by avoiding xslt work, opera can continue to be the extremely lightweight browser it is... you can't support everything if your biggest selling point is how lightweight you are)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Proof Nobody W3C Validates All The Time:
w .nobodyforpresident.org%2F
h ttp://www.nobodyforpresident.org/
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fww
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=
No error or warning found
Congratulations!
Valid CSS! This document validates as CSS!
[snip]
sIFR-flash {
* visibility : visible !important;
* margin : 0;
}
[snip]
Note on page: "Non W3C Browser - can't see above animation? - Click here"
Source: http://www.nobodyforpresident.org/
I might have some serious problems in my web page. If I validate it, I'll have to wade through 1000 silly little minor things.
Example of a minor thing: unknown attribute. Well, no shit. You're supposed to ignore unknown attributes.
Example of a major thing: the closing tags and opening tags got swapped
I not only validate my pages, but I also don't use any HTML or CSS "hacks". Sometimes this means using tables for non-tabular data. Sorry to trample on current web dogma, but users won't notice "semantic code" - they will notice a site that doesn't render properly in their browser due to CSS hacks. I didn't have to change a thing to make my sites work in IE7. If you use hacks, you probably can't say the same.
Besides, if you truly want a semantic web, you should code your pages in OWL! It's the logical conclusion of the current trend. I specialized in knowledge representation and reasoning and I could never understand what that language was getting at.
It amazes me that there are coders - even managers - who have posted here and do not use xhtml in utf-8.
Moreover, it amazes me even more that an xml signature in front of validating xhtml sticks MSIE into quirks mode.
We've been writing valid xhtml utf-8 sites for years now. The advantages are many. xml coding turns content into an asset beyond mere presentation - and data miners and other intelligent agents can make use of xml with ease.
I guess that many people just never bother to learn how to code properly, or don't see the long term benefit to their sites, or to the sites commissioned by their clients.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
Yes I care about W3C standards compliance. I take pride in my work and do not settle for bodges. There are also benefits to producing clean code, in bandwidth and processing savings. More sites and publishers should be making the effort to ensure that the pages they present are in compliance to accepted standards. My site http://slashboot.org/ is standards compliant and I take pride in that. I prefer XHTML Strict, as I see this becoming a future standard of choice for the majority of people who also take pride in their work
Anyhoo, the ACID2-compliant versions of Opera and Safari are beta releases and not displayed on their main download pages. Opera's download page displays Opera 8.5.4. Safari's download page displays Safari 1.2. IMO, I don't think ACID2 compliance is something to brag about if your compliant browser isn't stable enough for release.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
View this page from Australia's Commonwealth Bank in any Mac browser:
http://www.commbank.com.au/personal/
We code to w3c standards throughout building templates, usually using firefox and web developer plugin. In our experience this makes the site work great in everything except IE. So basically we use IE propriety conditionals and javascript to fork what will end up rendering in the browsers... w3c for modern browsers is default and IE gets different css and markup where needed. All in one set of source on the server side.
The important thing to remember is that GUI browsers on a personal computer aren't the only clients visiting web pages. If you want good search results... you best have machine-readable markup. That means well formed and to standards. Some phones are going to parse the markup and then decide how to render it... if at all. help systems, email clients... the list goes on.
That being said, the most important thing is to produce markup that a buggy parser with little or no error handling won't choke on. Then you can make it look pretty on a PC. You don't get there with the mentality "the majority is using browser x, we'll just code to that". You have to start with a solid foundation and then deviate as needed. Coding for w3c provides that foundation and has certainly made making pages render correctly much easier.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
It's just not that difficult! How hard is it to not use IE-specific code, avoid things like tags, and self-close tags that need it? All my personal works are XHTML 1.1 / CSS 2, and I even usually write HTML in XHTML 1.1 out of habit anyway. There are even ways to get around IE restrictions on what you can do, such as Sl eight</a> for PNG translucency, that don't break standards-compatibility.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Until they drop their absolute requirement of !DOCTYPE, I will consider compliance as unnecessary. Unless you are sending xml or xhtml, you don't need it period.
I take pride in the fact that my pages are W3C compliant (until I stop using Firefox and start putting in the hacks to get it to work right with IE...) The way I see it is that even though browsers are going to be adding and removing their nonstandard little extra bits, the standards the W3C puts in should at least be partially obeyed by every browser out there. So if I make a compliant page, it'll last hella longer than if I programmed it specifically with IE in mind. Besides, considering the progress made since even a few years ago towards standards compliance...yeah, IE still sucks at it, but 6 is better than 5 was as far as supporting standards go, and if we're lucky, 7'll be even closer. Plus more people are using (more) compliant browsers. I'd say intentionally IE-only pages at this point would be stupid.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
I think the big problem in web development, is that there's a much different mindset from other programmers. I'll admit to it, I first got into computers by making webpages, and doing some Javascript work. The way web developers think and work is much different from how, say, a C developer would work. In C if you have a syntax error, your code won't compile. You must fix it. With HTML/CSS, if you have invalid syntax it won't get fixed because some sort of hacky browser behaviour might compensate. There is no impetus to fix anything. Javascript errors are all over the place. When I open up Firefox's JS Console to work on a web app, it's filled with countless errors from many websites, many mainstream websites. How a webpage is developed is a lot different as well. Webpages are hacked together, haphazardly. Little thought or concern goes into the elements and attributes used. C developers (and other programmers) are so concerned with code as to have design patterns. There are no Javascript design patterns. Few care that it is better to use to emphasize text than to throw in a to italicize it. I have to say, when I started programming, it was quite the leap.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be bannana-shaped.
Until a few months ago I was lead developer at a European online bookmaker with a monthly gross margin of 1 million euro. We developed for IE6, and made sure things also worked with the latest Firefox, and that was it, anything else was not an issue. Not how it should be perhaps, but with legacy spaghetti code and an ever growing list of requested new features, that was the choice we made with regards to W3C compatibility.
W3C compliance doesn't really translate to a net gain or loss of income if you're running a commercial site, nor a loss of traffic if a non-commercial site, nor does it provide you any legal protection no matter what kind of site you're running.
But if you're selling something, especially selling something to government entities in the US, or you're developing educational and informational sites for the public, compliance with web accessibility standards is of the utmost importance and trumps W3C any day of the week.
Of course, good W3C compliance makes it easier to retrofit non-508-compliant pages. And 508-compliant pages are much easier to make W3C compliant, conversely.
But at the end of the day, it's whether the site is accessible to everyone, not the coding standard, that really matters to the bottom line or the lawyers.
Number one: Quirks Mode. As long as browsers try to correct invalid documents, there is not real incentive for valid documents to be produced. Interoperability can't be fully achieved, and machine-to-machine exchange of data remains tenuous.
And this is the trade off between theory and practise. In theory, browsers should not have a quirks mode because it allows for bad code and slows down the overall progress of the web. In practise, browsers that don't render in quirks mode will break pages and Joe User who doesn't know or care the difference between quirks & strict modes will nearly always interpret "misrendered" pages as a browser failure and not a code failure.
Think about Grannie Websurfer. She's used IE for years because it was on the computer she got. Now she hears the hype about a new browser and decides to try it out because it's more secure. If the new browser doesn't have quirks mode and starts breaking all her favorite sites she's going to go right back to IE. And the experience is likely to damage any chance of her switching again for a long time. She doesn't give a shit about standards and "W3C", she cares about her stupid soap opera page rendering properly and if it works fine on IE but doesn't work fine in Browser X that will be a problem with browser X.
Furthermore, the W3C just produces documents, and there is no body anywhere to monitor and enforce standards compliance among browser vendors
Welcome to the free market. There shouldn't be a body enforcing browser makers to follow the standards, it should be up to the browser makers. If developers put together a crap browser they will lose market share. Talk all the crap you want about Internet Explorer, for a long time it had many flaws but it was the best available browser. Monopolies and other crap aside, Internet Explorer became better than Netscape. Notice that while Microsoft is still a monopoly and Firefox hasn't come preinstalled on any mass-produced computers, Firefox is gaining impressive market-share. A better browser has been created and people are flocking to it.
I will not use a website which forces:
Cookies
Java Script
Flash
Web-bugs
etcetera
It is more important to me that a webpage meets MY standards than it matters whether a tag is properly closed and some minor functionality fails.
As of Konqueror 3.5.2, it officially passes too.
On a sidenote, I love taking peoples Windows machines to the ACID2 test with IE, just to show them how terrible it is.
The word you intended was 'Converse', not 'Contrapositive'. If a conditional statement
is true, then the contrapositive is always true. The truth value of the converse is
undetermined.
*sigh* back to work...
i *always* use w3.org's validators to validate my html AND my css. now if they would just make a validator for my embedded ActiveX controls, i'd be golden!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Yes I care about W3C standards compliance. I take pride in my work and do not settle for bodges. There are also benefits to producing clean code, in bandwidth and processing savings. More sites and publishers should be making the effort to ensure that the pages they present are in compliance to accepted standards. My site http://slashboot.org/ is standards compliant and I take pride in that. I prefer XHTML Strict, as I see this becoming a future standard of choice for the majority of people who also take pride in their work
On heavily content managment based sites, it's virtally impossible to guarantee the pages will pass the validator tests if you allow the owner/users to add content with e WYSIWYG editor in the backend. They'll always find some way of screwing it up, no matter how many safeguards are in place.
So unless you're limiting them to text only, plus a controlled image uploader, you have to live with it.
That's not to say the site shouldn't validate before they get their hands on it though - it's hard to excuse plain broken markup or hacks these days. Maybe 5 years ago...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
...not with any goddamn validator. If our users choose to browse with a hammer, we will serve them nails. It they browse with a spoon, we will serve them soup. The day they choose to browse with the W3C validator, we will serve validated pages.
Whenever a new kind of feature is implemented, I test it on IE/Win, Firefox and Opera. Not having a Mac at the office, I don't test it on Safari, but for some reason, it always works on Safari when the three other browsers work. (that's the thing about Apple: everything works, gotta love it)
Satisfying the W3C validator would be like tweaking the pages to work for yet another browser, one which noone uses. Tell me that a page that validates will render reasonably well on all browsers, I tell you that "reasonably well" does not do it. I need to implement a certain layout and functionality 100%. Either a browser is supported or it isn't. Tell me that a page that validates will render reasonably well in the future, and I tell you that a page which does not render well on a new version of a common browser will be complained about within 5 minutes, and a fix will be expected by the end of the day. That's the deal with paying customers.
I don't bother with any of the fol-de-rol. I need pages that render fast, and look pretty much the same in any browser. The only way I have found to do that is to leave the CSS and other crap out. My website is of a fairly esoteric interest, and the main point is to get information in front of users, so I can be reasonably certain that anything else would simply be smoke and mirrors, and absolutely unnecessary.
Others may not be in the same position.
Of course, it would be real nice if all the browsers would be W3C compliant, so it wouldn't be an issue...
Mod parent up. ;)
My university recently just hired someone for a newly created "Web Accessibility" coordinator position. Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act is important to public schools and government.
Dreamweaver--and I imagine similar web dev suites are in the game--have accessibility featuers built in to help make sure you specify alt tag for all images and so on. A lot of WAI requirements are good web practices to follow anyway. Information wants to be free (accessible)
Actually, Safari (and thus, any KHTML based browser) was the first to pass the acid 2 test. Less than a week later Opera 9 beta passed too. My point is not to reiterate was has already been said in this thread, but to point out just how fast browsers (non-IE) are progressing toward compliance. If you plan to have a website longer than a year, why wouldn't you take the time to be compliant?
Similes are like metaphors
In my day job, I've worked on a site for nearly 12 years. Clean code was always a goal and it was sometimes achieved. The problem was getting other people to understand why clean code was important.
Since I was the one maintaining the code, I wanted things to be as easy as possible to maintain. The ad agencies and their stupid code monkeys, though, only cared about getting things to look right. So their crappy HTML was never easy to maintain.
This last time, though, we did it right. Semantic XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS, separating design from behavior from markup. Maintenance is much easier because nearly anyone can understand and write the simple HTML the site requires. We're currently altering the design for our new corporate masters and keeping our basic structure and semantics. It's a lot less time consuming and just better than the old way. We're doing in weeks what used to take months and with a lot fewer people.
The problem is that the new corporate overlord's site is the same crappy tables and class="blueNav" crap that I've spent the last few years getting away from. It's like they are stuck in the 1990s. Time to educate them all over again...
I'm not too concerned with whether my HTML validates, but I make sure that any Javascript and CSS I use are correct (i.e. no warnings or errors in the Firefox Javascript console). There's nothing more annoying than trying to debug Javascript in a Firefox extension when I have my GMail open in a tab, as it spews out CSS and Javascript warnings and errors so fast that any extension related errors are lost in the flow.
You could do the transformation on the server side; you'd get the same compliance benefits. If you don't have the cycles to spare, I think it can be done in Javascript on the client end (when required) for browsers like Opera.
Microsoft has yet to release a browser that comes close to supporting standards
This is often shouted and an easy way to bash MS. It's also completely wrong.
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time. IE3 was the first major browser (outside of W3C testbeds) with CSS support. IE4 brought CSS-P support, while NS4 introduced the totally non-standard LAYER tag, then made a bad stab at implementing CSS-P under sufferance. IE5/Mac was easily the most standards-compliant browser on the Mac for years. The Mozilla project had been going for a while when IE6 came out, and Mozilla might be considered the better browser of the two if you rate standards compliance several miles above stability and speed.
The reason IE6 is bashed so hard by designers these days is not that IE6 was a particularly bad release. It's that it's bad by today's standards, and nothing's been done to fix it. This is a different issue, and one that the IE7 team has been loudly busting a gut to address. (There is also the utterly shameful issue of IE6's many security problems, which is a different argument, but it's one of the main reasons I've been using Mozilla-based browsers since 1.0)
And if you're still not convinced of anything other than Firefox's total superiority over IE in all standards-related matters, how about we dig up an issue of HTML4 compliance which IE's had right for years, and Mozilla/Firefox never has.
I won't go into why validation is important, others have covered that well. Instead, here's just a couple of thoughts from the trenches.
Compliance is simple when you have full control over the site and all data that is input. In business reality, this is impractical. Fact is, editors, salespeople and the CEO will want to make website changes. Now, you could make it your job to clean up the garbage HTML sent by these folks. What you'll figure out quickly though, is that suicide is a more attractive option. So we of course now have content management systems so our bosses, et. al. can change what they like at 2 in the morning.
The thing is, these people will do horrible, horrible things. They will paste the most evil non-ASCII characters you could ever imagine into your lovely system. If you've only (gasp) given them a textarea in which to paste HTML, things are even uglier - they will paste the worst hackjob code you can imagine into there. Or worse, they'll paste the output of the MS word HTML export (yikes!). So now what you have is a lovely framework / skin for your site with pristine tags for navigation and advertisements, with a nice steaming heap of dog doo in the middle of it.
So now you're not compliant. Not because of anything you did directly yourself, but because you just handed the keys to the kingdom over to the vilage idiot.
Here's how I deal...
1) DON'T ALLOW FOREIGN HTML. This can easily be achived if your CMS provides an in-page HTML editor which produces valid code. You may be able to upgrade an existing CMS with something like "HTMLArea": http://sourceforge.net/projects/itools-htmlarea which is a replacement for a textarea tag.
failing #1,
2 Run W3CTidy (as others have mentioned) on the INPUT to your CMS. Give the jackass a preview. If it's borked, they'll try to fix it or call you if they really can't do it.
Happy webmastering!
--graveyhead
(cred)
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
The way I look at it, making websites w3c compliant is like making code that generates 0 warnings on compilation. Sure, it doesn't guarantee perfection, and it's sometimes not that important, but it will also often turn up small bugs that might bite big later, it isn't all that hard to do, and it's good practice imho.
just my $0.02.
I think that in most cases, you are better off without using a DOCTYPE statement. If you tell a web browser that your site is XML 1.0 Strict, it might try to use an XML parser to read the site, which could cause lots of problems if it isn't. And even if your site is true XML, why not have it put to the HTML parser anyway. It's good to program with standards, but often it's good to get the browser to punt to the HTML parser, which will usually parse any crap that anyone tosses at it.
It seems that most of the web 2.0 sites use only strict XML in their site, and they might get Geek Cred for that, but the sites end up being dull looking, because they can only allow for a limited amount of text. Think del.icio.us, which will parse nicely. It has no images, and no user generated styles. Why not? I bet they don't want to have to handle others html errors. They can clean up text only, but not other stuff. It works for them, but you can tell that they may be limited by what they allow users to input. Google doesn't seem to be strict anything, but they seem to know what they are doing. I think most browsers will parse it. Myspace seems to allow a wide range of user input, and it doesn't parse as standard. They seem to get traffic, and users seem to enjoy the flashing bright lights, and the songs playing the second you visit the site.
The one thing that gets me is people using divs when they should use tables. Divs have not deprecated. For all the grail hunters, you are being duped... tables is the only true solution.
It's a wee bit disingenuous to blame browsers for the lack of strictly validating web pages out there. I'd venture that upwards of 90% of the issues you see when you validate pages against the HTML 4.0 schema are not there because the author had to violate the standard in order to achieve the effect in some non-compliant browser. They are there because the author achieved the effect he wanted and did bother to check whether he had, or could, achieve it in a standards-compliant way. From the beginning, browsers tried to degrade gracefully in the face of invalid input, and as long they do that there will continue to be a lot of invalid input out there.
the K.I.S.S. principle
Keep It Simple Stupid
there's also the other KISS principle: i'd rather kiss off the entire opera user base (small as it is) than bend over backwards coding so much extra for their sake
thems the breaks
none of have infinite time and patience
besides, i would be surprised if opera isn't eyeing support for xslt, especially as xml and xhtml use only grows over time. imagine opera not supporting css? same issue in the xml world
sorry opera aficionados. i have mad respect for your browser, but not much time or patience to put in much more effort for your sake. but xslt support isn't really an esoteric demand on my part. and opera knows that. and it only gets more and more necessary as xml + client side xslt grows in popularity, as the wonderful speed-increasing, flexibility-enabling, and server-sparing tech it is
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If someone was working on the electrical engineering for a space shuttle for NASA, would they say "Well, I know I should stick to standards, but I wanted to attach this detached horses leg to the hull of the shuttle, so I did." NO, likewise, no-one should be placing horses limbs on web pages either. Not unless it's compliant. Developing standards compliant sites is completely 100% necessary. The people who don't support standard compliant development are people who are technically incapable of it. They were bought up with the OLD wave of design, unfortunately they haven't kept up to date with the times, and are FAR TOO OLD to catch on. Get with the times, old timers!! You're Old... You're just so... Old! Also it might be worth mentioning that anti-standards compliant people are almost always Microsoft lovers.
when I was in web dev I allways ran my sites through w3c validator, and fixed all the error's it spit out... on the condition that fixing the error still rendered the site fine in IE, many times IE wont take valid html and renders it incorectly, incase you got leave the error in there to get the job done...
I keep the standards in my head, and design for them. Then I actually write the implementation for Firefox. Then I go back, fix all the deviations from the standard that I can fix, and validate. Then I test it in IE 6, and cripple the pages horribly till they work. Depending on the project, I'll do the same for Safari afterwards. Mostly, if people send me bug reports that my stuff looks bad on other browsers, I reply along the lines of "yeah, sad isn't it? I heard the next version is going to be actually standards compliant." (For one specific recent project, I even did that for IE6... I detect IE using their stupid conditional comments, and display a big Firefox button.)
In the end, the page usually doesn't validate. It's sad, but I need pages that render on IE 6, not pages that validate. And yes, standards-compliant pages would mean I don't have to go fix them when new browsers with different bugs and deviations come out, but what do I care? The sites I work on already require constant maintenance anyway, and I think that is true of most sites worth publishing. If I was going to put up a site that I don't expect to maintain constantly, such as an archive, then I'd go for a very simple design, and full standards compliance. I think I might even have done that a few times in the past.
I ran Google through the validator and it came up with 72 errors. Does this mean Google does not know what they are doing? It seems more likely that for an actively updated site many of the standards are not neccesary.
When I create a website, I prefer to do it by hand in notepad or somesuch, because it lets me have more control. I don't want to bother writing extra or unnecessary code for one or two people. I know most of my readers use Firefox or IE. Even Opera will display sloppy code, but Firefox and IE and any other browser worth a damn are built with the average web page (I.E. sloppily coded) in mind.
...but if we all lived in theory everything would work all of the time. I always write my html to the xhtml strict standard and make sure my css is up to the current standard not because I personally care, but because of the ever expanding list of browsers I'd have to hack it to work with otherwise.. I mean we have cell phones, pda's, psps,xboxes, Wii is supposed to have a browser.. so instead of writing a separate style sheet for each (which you end up doing if you want to support IE... yech..) just write one that adheres to the way the standard is supposed to work and tell people to bitch to their browser developer if it looks wonky. PS: This is obviously not for commercial products.. as people don't ever think anything could be wrong with their precious browser... though if every website at once stopped making hacks to work for broken browsers.. perhaps people would start complaining to the web browser developers along with website developers.
ok.. so heads you lose tails I win. right?
First identify your target browsers (IE 5+, FireFox 1.0+, whatever), then make sure your website "looks nice" in these browsers. That's it.
There is no spoon.
First of all, yes, I do validate every page I make. Most of the people I worked for either wanted me to do it, or did not care if I did it.
As for the ACID2 Test, the CSS they use is actually not valid, according to W3C! Try it -- look at the source code, copy the CSS and submit it to the validator. It will tell you that there are errors. I can't really post the link here, because it is too long, unfortunately.
HTML isn't Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is Browser Data Format. The W3C's HTML specs have always been afterthoughts, incidental.
Jesus, yes, I validate every page. So do many others. That's what those funny little W3C buttons all over the web mean!!!
Nuts. This is as bad as counting "security patches" as if all bug were equally important.
You link to the fact that Mozilla renders one character incorrectly, while ignoring things like the fact that MSIE fails to render large chunks of standard compliant pages at all. They just vanish, poof. If these were the only two bugs, I suspect you'd say that they were "equally standards compliant" wouldn't you? After all, they only have one bug each, right?
Bah I say.
--MarkusQ
Not true at all. It's all documented, what's allowed nested in what, what's required, so on and so forth. It's just not easy. Automatic validation like that will be a feature of the 1.5 or 2.0 release of my dynamic site generation framework, I've already worked out a way to do it and got it working with Ruby's native object model (although any strong object-oriented language would do), it's just going to be a pain in the ass. Especially getting it to work with Ajax and making strong guarantees about the validity of the (XML|X?HTML)/CSS regardless of how much JS mangling you do--as long as you do it through the framework. I'm not a miracle worker. Luckily, I'm writing it for free, so there's no real downside to taking a ridiculously long time to write a feature of questionable worth.
Viva la OSS! It sure takes a long time to write.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I do my best to try and make sure everything is valid. The future of the web should hopefully be all web browsers being validated, so once i'm done validating I go through and test my site on every computer, every browser, and every operating system I can get my hands on. It might require a few extra tidbits here or there, but in the end I think it works.
Say what?!
And lest anyone think that the comment at the end of this story about the version used not being publicly available... That is no longer correct. The shipping version of Safari as been ACID2 compliant for a while now.
I'm afraid it doesn't really matter if I care about W3C standard or not... all the people that matter do already.
At work, I keep up the websites for a public government entity. It's been legally required since 1997 that any government agency web site (at least in NY, I'm a little fuzzy on the legislative aspects) is accessible to those with disabilities, and the first step to that is W3C compliance. It makes sense; have you ever seen a government building without a wheelchair ramp? Why should the web sites be any different?
On my own time, all of my sites comply because of Google. They have a tendency to give a much higher pagerank if your site is W3C compliant, or even if it follows the spirit of the standards. Search engine love the barebones HTML of a standards-compliant page.
You can't claim something is a standard, when it's not the standard. IE is the browser market, it therefore is the standard. Coding to a fake standard which isn't compatible with 90% of browsers just doesn't make sense. If W3C was smart they would make a standard that works 100% with IE, then people could actually use it as a standard.
I personally run my sites through the 508, AAA, xhtml and css validators. I find that if your standards compliant first, it's a million times easier to make teh few adjustments to make each browser behave (particularly IE).
I think it's also a point of how professional you can claim to be if you don't even make the effort to ensure that your page is going to be accessible to other (browsers | people | OSes | etc.).
no, when i *start* a website, i'm running it through the validator. producing valid html and css isn't some kind of bonus afterthought. it's something you do from line 1.
Its a display language. Personaly Time in business is more important than worrying about abiding by every anal WC3 standard. If I have a project for our Intranet and it needs to be completed for use by the next day, Im not going to spend wasteful time making sure it passes acid2. Ill spend TIME making sure the logic code is correct without errors. In regards to the display in the browser, Ill do whatver works using standard HTML, DHTML and CSS and yes mr acid test, that may include a font tag here or a table there. Its not a crime.
I've read many of the comments on here, and man am I feeling like a heel. I know I'm not the only web developer that doesn't give a hoot about that little W3C compliant icon. As long as the site operates properly in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and IE ( as I've designed it to operate ), then that suites me fine. After 5 years of developing the same site, the only complaints I receive on it are ones about my poor design.
This brings to mind the software developers that howl about their Interface Standards ( I can't even remember the acronym they use for these standards ) I've supported the development of software for the past 3 years, and have yet to look at these Interface Standards.
I focus on the end-users eyeballs. If some developer comes along and wants to complain about my syntatical correctness - they can either copy/past my HTML to make it better - or provide a patch for my software. The regular users are quite satisfied.
My Thoughts, Kyndig
1. the whole "genius" of client-side xslt is it makes the client do work that would otherwise drag the server. my server just spits out naked xml. the server is stripped down in its workload to the most naked thing you need the server for: raw data. you don't even need a webserver. you just need a database plugged into port 80 ;-P (well, not really, but you get my point)
;-) now i can code with even more confidence that i'm on the right path
the client has to do all the heavy sorting and formatting work to make it pretty and readable. i like that scheme. a lot. i call it K.I.S.S. Keep It Simple Stupid. put that up there with Ajax in terms of development paradigms which mean something significant to me, for whatever that is worth. and in fact i think this KISS will only get more and more popular as a development approach. even though i find people are put off by xslt. but it REALLY isn't that complicated. here's an excellent tutorial
you don't even have to mess with javascript transforms (well, you do, if you want an interactive site, i'm just talking you don't need to use javascript in your development scheme to get bare functionality, to get the paradigm that works here). it's really the same idea as html + css, except it takes the idea of content versus formatting to an even deeper level of separation: raw data versus all the markup, pushing all the markup to the client. so if you dig why css is so important, you'll understand my reluctance to server-side my xslt
to me, asking me to server-side the xslt is like asking me to get rid of all css and format each tag individually. bleh. no thanks. more work, slower performance, heavier on the wire
2. great news on opera 9
watch this idea: xml + client-side xslt. KISS to me. raw data only from the server, and all formatting on the client side. even though it's an ancient idea, i think it will be just like with AJAX, which was ALSO an ancient idea that just suddenly got a massive thrust in terms of modern development interest
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well how is this done?
Absolutely. I always validate all pages for W3C compliance.
It can save time in the future. The current trend is that browsers are moving towards the standards rather than away from them, so in general it is better to comply with the standards to future proof your site (to some extent).
Incidentally there is a great extension available for firefox that checks your HTML:
HTML Validator
This allows you to check pages as you view them, which is quicker than loading them into the validator.
meh
As a matter of fact I try to make it standard compliant as much as I can and I also validate the pages whenever I have time to tweak stuff
But I also make sure it works on firefox by not using features that are not supported by it, standard compliance is one thing but standard abuse is something else
My finished pages are standard compliant and also work correctly on IE and Firefox. Sum IE is still the most used browser and firefox is still the 2nd place. That's enough of a reason not to use the features that are used by the Acid test. Of course, once official firefox starts supporting them I am gonna be more open to use those features.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
our company has a specialist of html (a girl:) who spends tons of time ensuring our projects' web pages work properly across multiple major browsers/versions and pass the w3c html/css check.
we believe that it's a good habit to make web pages w3c compliant, that ensures your web pages work properly with w3c compliant browsers. meanwhile, we will take care of browsers such as IE which has buggy html/css support by using some tricks/workarounds to make it render properly too.
twitter.com/xuyihua
I am the lead developer/designer of my company's web department, and (at least in my office) I require my employees to write standards complient/well-formed code for a few reasons.
It's easy to read.
We often have multiple people developing web sites and if there is one thing that bothers me is that I can't easily find where I need to add or remove items (See any web page created by FrontPage or Dreamweaver).
Clean code is a step towards SEO web sites
One of the things we try to strive for is SEO web sites. We can pitch something like that to a client and get them to pay more for the "quality" of their website. Our clients don't know much about internet marketing plans, but when you tell them that their web site is optimized for search engine's crawlers, they like to hear it.
Cross-browser compatability.
Sure standards aren't supported by every browser, but I found that the less 'bloated' the code is, the better chance you have to make the web page appear similar in all browsers. Of course there will be differences on that page in different browsers, but that can't really be avoided. But I think standards complient code will help you get a close as possible.
Those are the major reasons I opted to enfore my employees to use standards complient code, and in my opinion I think that any web developer/designer that doesn't at least attempt to write valid/complient code is either purposely trying to complete a website within a deadline they can't meet or they're just plain lazy.
"Acid2 Goes on Safari
...
...and... BTW this version(of safari) was released shortly after this...
Yesterday Dave Hyatt posted news that Safari now passes the Acid2 test, making it the first browser to do so. Patches to enable Acid2 related support have been made available in Hyatts announce post, linked above. Under the circumstances, I thought it would be unfair to simply announce the news, so I
By Ben Henick | April 28th, 2005"
Any idiot can code sloppy HTML, and I don't want to be any idiot. That's what made me start writing all my pages code-compliant and that's why I keep doing it. It's also a guilty pleasure to "stick it to the man" as it were. That'll show microsoft that they can't create up their own markup! Yeah! Then again, I'm just a hobbiest designer, and I don't have to deal with budgets and such. Still, I take a measure of pride in the fact that I can say I write standards compliant code. That's one geek's oppinion anyway.
Was everyone asleep in the last quarter of 2005?
w ins-the-acid2-race/
Apple's Safari 2.0.2, which was part of the Mac OS X 10.4.3 update (November 2, 2005, or there about) was the *FIRST* ACID2 compliant browser to ship to market.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/11/02/safari-
There are dozens more sites with the news, just Google it!
Pretty much everything is designed for "IE" where I work. However - for good practice I ensure that pages display correctly/nicely in Firefox and Lynx.
Getting hung up on strict XHTML compliancy is too time consuming for people who actually have things to do.
It's like some publications/people saying layouts should not use tables; Again, time consumption.
There's a happy medium between productivity - and quality of product. Every business on the face of the planet must come to terms with this.
probably won't pass ACID2. Using the Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060415 Firefox/3.0a1 ID:2006041504 [cairo] build, no ACID2 compliance. Just checked while reading this article.
13. Any legal action is absolutly excluded. (Pi World Ranking List rules)
I think it's inaccurate to say it remains to be seen if IE7 will change this. Microsoft has released beta 2 to the public and from my limited testing there have already been significant improvements in the renderer. I was pleased to find that my standards-compliant sites without IE hacks already work nearly flawlessly in IE7.
I don't care, but don't let that stop you from trying to tell me anyway.
Now if we could only get you to run spell check on every post...
Who gives a flying leap about W3C. the organization is no longer relevant and is stuck doing BS. Let it die already and hand the specs over to an organization that knows how to do things.
Why the fuck should I be bothered with this artificial rating system? I simply make a webpage for those that are interested. I don't need to be up-to-date with all the flashy/proven insecure technologies. All I need my webpage for is contacting my family, and on occasion making a point in a simple statement. Again, why do I need to be worried about such an artificial rating system? Someone explain this to me, because I'm pretty lost here.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Both. You'd have to be some sort of retard to ignore the standard or ignore how it's rendered.
Help us build a better map!
OK, maybe this story was just posted to stir up debate, but really - it's possible to develop an attractive site with valid, standards-compliant, semantic code that works perfectly for 99.8% of visitors and usably for the other 0.2%.
No, it's not frequently done. Yes, it takes a bit more time (and hence money). But it's actually not a great deal more work.
So it's not just a choice of "standards" vs. "works". Geez.
"I'm seeing a lot of knee-jerk anti-flash prejudice in your comment. "
For similiar reasons that people criticize Linux. Someone would try to install an old version of Linux. It wouldn't be a good experience. And then they would swear off Linux, and bad-mouth it to anyone within earshot. Flash is useful in the hands of someone trained properly, and I should point out that Flash is used for more than just the web.* Flash as you pointed out can also do some things that would involve a lot more work in other technologies. (Look at some Flex examples), and sometimes do them better.
*I use it for UI mockups amoung other things.
First time is the hardest, but everything gets used to.
To make it a snap, I do on-the-fly validation when I write web pages.
99.9% of all sites abuse stylesheets to specify an ABSOLUTE FONT SIZE for fonts, so browsers who follow the specs won't allow you to resize them (like MSIE). Because the people who make the sites only care about it looking good on THEIR MACHINE, not on everybody elses - damn annoying you have to try and read a site with a magnifying glass. Oh if only the web lived up to Berners Lees ideas: Scalable webpages. But of course there isn't much utopia in this world (even most of Slashdots pages looks crap, and do they care? Nooooooo of course not)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I have developed sites both using tag soup AND strict HTML and XHTML. It takes no longer to do things the standards way, and using standards will almost ALWAYS make maintenance easier and therefore faster. That's ROI.
Finally, I use Firefox's tidy validator. It takes no time to validate your code (literally, it gives you a status bar icon indicating success or failure) and I have found that more often that not, checking for validation errors helps you find logical errors in your scripting code (e.g. incorrect criteria with a loop over a recordset).
It pays to use standards. I speak from experience. That doesn't mean that you have to slavishly adhere to them in certain situations. 99% of the time, though, there is no real excuse to ignore them.
blah blah blah
Writing to a standard is important. I can label my page XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant and know that if a browser supports that standard, my page will show properly (or atleast very close). I can develop in Firefox and have a high degree of confidence the design will render and function properly in Konqueror, Safari, Opera and other browsers.
Beyond this, I follow accessibility guidelines so individuals with disabilities can access the content with ease (ie color blind tests, speech synthesis navigation, access keys, etc.)
Being able to study and master a standard and write compliant pages is a very enjoyable process. Knowing my design is accessible for a wide range of users (users with disabilities, pdas, cellphones, desktops, laptops, various operating systems, etc..) is very important. Knowing that future versions of browsers should not break my pages (such as the issue with IE6 pages breaking with IE7) is reassuring that there is some future-proof to the design.
Unfortuantely we live in a world where Internet Explorer still dominates. And unfortunately a nicely developed compliant page tends to break in various ways in Internet Explorer -- this absolutely SUCKS. So the use of dumbed down syntax, hacks and other workarounds are the norm to attempt to make what IE6 renders look presentable while still maintaining compliance. PITA.
This is where it gets tricky. Do I *really* want to spend time attempting to shoehorn an elegant standards compliant webpage into IE6? Does my customer want to pay? I think the answer is a reassounding "NO". Developing *for* IE6 tends to be more ideal as many browsers have had to compromise to render poorly written IE-exclusive pages properly. Generally a customer is much more forgiving if a page doesn't render quite right outside of Internet Explorer. However, I believe in open standards and will continue to develop to the W3C standards *FIRST* and shoehorn it into IE as an afterthought. Granted, after learning the myriad of hacks and tricks and limitations of IE, this process does go much quicker- however, it still ultimately really sucks. Augh.
Returned in WC3's Mark-up validation Service: v0.72
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
you do realize that's intentional right?
The CSS is designed to ensure browsers handle invalid code properly.
+1 Insightful
Oh wait..
I validate each page on my site, and my job also expects that I will write code that is W3C compliant.
I validate because it means I have a better chance of my site working in all browsers (for longer). Plus I wanted to learn, and because trying to use CSS on code that isn't valid is tricky.
The main thing abount compliance is that it isn't the last thing on your list to do, it's something you aim for from the start of a project, and having worked with and without compliance, I prefer with.
And yes, I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I validate a page.
Rather, it increases the PR of properly formatted pages.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
I attempt to follow standards as much as possible, however because IE is so hideously broken, it almost doesn't matter. I recently developed a site, ran the validator on it, it passes fine, it all works in firefox and opera, displays how its supposed to, everything's great right? Open it in IE, totally broken, things don't line up, the spacing is wrong, everything looks like crap... go through everything to fix it, get it so it displays "right" in IE, run the validator again.... oops errors all over the place...
In short I don't think its possible to write a standards compliant page and have it display in IE properly, as long as this situation persists, it will be impossible to push "standards" on the internet. If the standards don't display correctly on 90% of the computers, what are you supposed to do?
There are several types of them:
Validation fanatics:
They believe that they should unconditionally comply with the W3C (and the other) validators and this means they did a good page.
They compare the validators to the compiler syntax checks other languages do before compilation. Of course, no compilator in the world will stop you from writing buggy crappy useless programs, but they don't like to talk about that.
Another thing many of them don't assess, is that validators are just a guide, not God, and like any software tool, they have bugs and can miss plenty of code flaw types, or print code warnings or even code errors where there are none.
An advice to validation fanatics: your web page won't be seen in a validator, it'll be seen in a browser.
XHTML fanatics:
Anything less than XHTML 1.1 Strict is crap. In certain cases they might do a great compromise and go for 1.0.
XHTML is just a rehash of HTML4 as an XML dialect. Unless you need to take advantage of your code being XML, there's no big advantage to using XHTML now* . All of the talk about future compatibility or how HTML 4 is obsolete is nonsense. Browsers will render HTML 1 for ages to come, same can be said for HTML 4.1, which still a nice, valid standard.
*exception: mobile browsers strictly requiring XHTML Mobile Profile this is still no XHTML 1.1 support, like many XHTML fanatics believe.
What XHTML fanatics forget is, it's not easy to write a real XHTML page nowadays, that would run in both existing and old HTML browsers (that actually includes IE6: over 85% market dominance) and XHTML browsers.
XHTML fanatics sometimes make basic mistakes, like putting contents of [style] or [script] blocks in comments, or forgetting to put them in CDATA blocks, in both cases, the resulting code is a broken XHTML page if it runs in strict mode. The reason they don't see it, is that XHTML browsers interpret XHTML like HTML, since it's served with the HTML MIME Type (if served with Application/XML, it'll break IE).
"No tables for layout" fanatics
So yes, W3C said it's not recommended to use tables for layout. And it's indeed not nice: the classic usage of tables for layot is a huge mess of plenty of table cells, 4-5 nested tables in one another, the code is unreadable and unmanagable without a WYSIWYG editor (and that in itself, spells trouble if the web dev/designer has no clue).
However, fanatics go further: they open the source of most site they visit, looking for "clues": if you do use tables for layout the site is marked invalid, the site author an idiot, and the site's actual contents discarded.
If you ask a "No tables for layot" fanatic for help and he sees you use a table, you can be laughed at, insulted, bashed on and so on.
The funny reality: CSS is still defficient as a layout tool for some pretty basic layout schemes. The workarounds include laughable stunts like 4-5 nested [div]-s or more (i.e. table tag mess in its new form), 3000px wide bitmaps with transparent areas and so on and so on.
So these types of fanatics will advise you to either go for display-type:table (not working in IE), go for the ugly hacks, or change your layout. The irony you need display-type:table in CSS is worth a separate post on its own.
Truth is, there's no drawback to using very simple tables styled with CSS for your layout, if there's no simple way to do it with CSS. No modern search engine or browser in the world has a problem with tables. No modern screen reader has problems with tables. No modern mobile browser has problems with tables. Try it in Opera (SHIFT+F11) and see how horizontal layouts made in tables are properly broken up vertically to allow for easy reading on a mobile device.
"Don't use crappy browser" fanatics
These guys believe it's their mission to talk, enforce, advice and so on their visitors to switch from their "crappy" browser (usually IE), to a better browser like Firefox. They also don't mind l
This comes up every few months in one forum or another, and there usually seems to be a 50/50 split between the purists and the ... "pragmatists" (I'm being generous).
To see that the slashdot population (or at least the pop with moderation privs today) has finally mustered up a solid consensus in favor of standards-based design is excellent news.
Sure, there are the outlying "my boss says only IE matters" and "tables were good enough for 1996, so they're good enough for me" folks, but they're just faux-nostalgic fear-of-change types. Attrition is inevitable.
This is the best and most interesting news I've read on slashdot in a long time.
which is the only standard above 2.0 that has a chance of rendering well in most browsers.
I have always valued w3 compliance in my web applications. Though some browser companies may choose to not be w3 compliant, at least I know that my pages are set to the standard and will work in browsers that adhere to them.
I always display the w3 validate tag on my sites.
Konquerer also passed the ACID2 test. Can we please get some fact-checking before articles go public?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
ACID2 abuses the CSS2 standard to it's extend, this means the CSS2 contains errors. How these errors should be "fixed" by the browser is defined in the CSS2 standard. And that is what the ACID2 test is about. The ACID2 test doesn't pass CSS2 validation because of the errors.
But still that doesn't mean you shouldn't write proper CSS2 and (X)HTML
A standard compliant website more or less guarantees that your website will work atleast decently now, tomorrow and in the far future. A non-standard with hacks might just aswell not render at all in 4 years.
;)
This is what we in the field like to call "job security."
For personal sites, code it correctly or you'll have to fix it in a few years. For sites where you have no chance in hell of convincing your PHB that standards are a good idea and he'll likely mark you down in your performance review for time wasting, do exactly as he asks, safe in the knowledge there'll be plenty of work for them to pay you for next year and the year after and the year after that. Really, it's their way of giving a little something back.
Sure, you could cripple your browser by having it refuse to render non-compliant pages. You would also ensure that everyone ran off to a browser which actually attempted to render in excess of 40% of the Internet without popping up a dialog which is meaningless to the end user. You think Firefox would jump to add *non-standard, user-screwing* behavior just because Microsoft did? I bet the IE team doesn't think so.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
FireBug is a good Firefox extension to catch evil tings in your page.It has a builtin validator as well.
The validator is a great tool for finding bugs in your HTML. Missing closing tags, quotes, messed up parameters. But sometimes validator is overzealous, swallowing (and barfing) pieces of html contained within javascript, parts that are (correctly) commented out, usage of national characters in non-UTF8 non ISO-8859-1 documents, missing parameters that should be long put out of misery (type="text/javascript"), and generally panics and goes berserk in places where it should at most frown.
So I use it as an advisory tool. Run the page through it,
* if it points out bugs, thank you, I fix them,
* if it dislikes few unimportant arguable bugs, I fix them for bigger e-penis of the "compatibile" tag.
* if it barfs a long list of bullshit (URLs containing & are defacto standard for ages now...) screw it.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
wtf is DOCTYPE? lol what's wrong with just HTML /HTML? Thought the beauty of hand coding webpages was so it was clean of all of the unneeded crap that programs like Dreamweaver add to bloat the page.
I have a very small page and the validator has 43 errors reported. All standard HTML.
HTML and TABLE.
I try my best to keep my website valid xhtml.
No, I will not work for your startup
As a professional web developer and coder, I always make sure that I am valid - using the Strict templates, even, when I make a website for clients. When I compile code in Java or C/C++, if I get any warnings or errors, obviously I fix them; the same applies with my XHTML and CSS - if errors or warnings occur, I fix them so that it is valid.
To get onto my personal site, everything goes through XHTML validation as the last stage of the build system. If it doesn't validate, it doesn't appear. I think it makes sense to do validation this way.
I see lots of sites with 'Valid (X)HTML' buttons, which when pressed go to W3C's validator, which checks the referrer. 9 times out of 10, it wasn't valid at all.
There's basically just one reason why I try to follow the specs: it's easier to debug layout problems in strict mode than in quirks mode. Always having to second-guess the browser whenever some part of the page ends up slightly off from where it's suposed to be just isn't fun.
As a few others herehave pointed out, validating afterwards might not be the best idea. The HTML Validator plugin for Firefox validates as you go, which makes errors visible directly when they are made (and therefore usually easier to correct).
print "Yet another p{erl,ython} hacker\n",
The HTML code of my site has always been standards compliant. The tricky part is how you code the CSS to make it show up properly with IE. When I recently revamped the layout I totally ignored IE. I was coding on a Linux box anyway. So I used standards only and tested in Firefox and Konqueror. I was not surprised that it didn't look quite as nice in IE. But this could easily be fixed with an IE-specific CSS include using . My focus was not to make it look nice on IE, but to get it to a point where the content was readable. In my opinion it's totally okay that people still using this broken IE thing get a worse browsing experience than people using a standards compliant tool.
. . .
:-)
Cry/laugh news from a developer friend who works a provincial part of the world. Suddenly I was hearing for the first time from him a rant against Flash. All my buddy's clients have wanted fancy Flash navigation for the sake of it. What killed flash? Adobe opting in Yahoo Toolbar on their download page for the latest plugin. Yeah, that killed it. Too complicated. It became a _support issue . . Now i can get to talk ECMA/CSS to my mate
Nothing against Flash, my mate has done some top work, mechanical training sims etc, for which Flash is a pretty much the choice for web delivery.
Me? At heart I'm still pitching art galleries why they should pay for Lynx support . .
CSS is just sooo 1997. What was it we were doing? I thought all this compatibility stuff was fixed with XSLT . . .
When I first started trying to make my projects W3C compliant, it drove me nuts! Either I could get things compliant or I could get them to look right (in modern browsers), but almost never both at the same time. I found it incredibly frustrating and a huge waste of time (css definately has that *designed by commitee* feeling! How about a way to *vertically* align a child in a box???!!!).
But you know what happened over the course of the last several years? I've learned how to build sites that are both compliant and still render correctly (yes, even in IE) without using any hacks (hacks are a guarentee that your site will stop working someday soon -> wait for IE 7 to hit the shores!).
It wasn't easy to achieve, and a lot of people will never get there, but it is possible with some time & effort.
So keep trying to make your sites compliant, after a while I think you'll find that you instincitvely build sites that work.
I work for the University of Texas as a web designer. I have recently completed a project to be accessible by the general public so they can learn American Sign Language. I spent much effort designing the website the way my bosses wanted it, all while maintaining web standards, and using browser hacks where necessary to make it work. Following standards is, as counterintuitive as it sounds, essential in order to maintain freedom from corporate control over the net. If we only code to IE, then Microsoft gets to dictate what works and what doesn't. There are many nice features to CSS3 that I fear will never get used if Microsoft decides they don't care about W3C standards.
;)
Also, UT has recently been auditing all their pages for compliance. They are even very grateful when I point out old javascript code that assumes a user has IE or Netscape. It's great when a university cares enough to support browsers that are used by well under 5% (I guess) of the student population.
Disclaimer: I'm an Opera fanboy, so I actually care about web standards
Hi, I'm probably going to start a flame war with this, but ...
The app I use to build web sites is an HTML generator called Freeway - see Softpress for more details. It generates HTML and XHTML, and the code validates every time.
I know, I know: I should be typing my fingers to the bleeding knuckles instead of using a DTP like interface, but I'm a graphic designer, NOT a coder, and I find it much easier for me to visualise my work as I go. I like Freeway because of it's designer-friendly interface, and the valid code output is icing on the cake.
If it looks alright in IE and Firefox it's good to go live!
Personally, I develop to standards and then use PHP infused CSS to make it look correct in the various browsers.
Yes, but with reservations.
As a developer, I seem to have often hit the snag where the client's requrements are in confict with what I openly advocate(web standards). Example: use of CSS and abandoning of older browsers (IE5).
I guess it goes down to a judgment call of the developer what to prioritize.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
It's a matter of using proper tools that don't let you break the code.
If you chaotically spit code fragments, you're likely not only to create invalid code, but you also risk XSS attacks.
Use server-side XSLT or some error-checking template system and half of the problem goes away.
The W3C Validator is useful in validating your code so that it is "valid", according to the standard. Problem is, I've yet to see any browser that properly implements every aspect of the W3C standard, so isn't code validity a bit pointless if it's not going to work properly in the market leading browsers? That's what annoys me about web development - nothing you ever learn works for more than two minutes, if it even works at all.
First, you have the websites that are IE-only, which should be shot on sight but can't be helped. But if you're developing for more browsers, then the W3C standards are your saviour. They mean you don't have to code one page for Mozilla, one for Opera, one for Safari and one for whatever else is out there. Particularly in automaticly generated code or templates they are the way to build durable components that won't need rewrites for every major browser version. The three step process to a good website:
1. Build a W3C compliant website
2. Include an additional CSS via IEs conditional comments
3. Unfuck your site in IE until it looks decent with overrides in that CSS. You may have to modify your code a little with some extra div's that hacks can operate on, but most things can be fixed in CSS.
That leaves a very good basic site design, and if you're targetting other browsers than IE then the overhead is really minimal.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
In that if my site were W3C compliant, I'd quickly change it so it no longered suffered from that problem.
/me eagerly awaits CSS 7
Code to standards the moment the standards make sense. Until then, any compliance should be looked at as a BadThing.
Do Not Encourage Bad Standards.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
All I know is the Google.com homepage doesn't even have a doc type. Why is Google not W3C Compliant?
It's a bit like voting - sometimes it seems a waste of time, but if everyone had that attitude then you'd end up with a dictatorship (IE, in this case).
I guess in some areas it's less important than others, such as a personal blog site or whatever.
But I work for a non-profit who are there to help people who are disadvantaged (socially, mentally or physically etc) and there's no doubt that a large part of the audience for our website have disabilities. W3C compliance is just the first (important, and really not that difficult) step in ensuring that your site is accessible to all audiences and complies to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Not only is it the law under the Disability Discrimination Act (UK) to make sure that a company website is accessible to disabled people (to approx WCAG level 2), it's just the responsible thing to do when you're providing such a service.
Even though we're small, I've had a few emails now from visitors from the council and other such places saying they've visited the site and are impressed that it complies with accessibility standards and not many like us display the consideration of making that kind of effort. IMO that alone makes it worthwhile.
Ofcourse fulfilling these requirements isn't trivial. But it's possible.
My Konqueror 3.5.2 passes it. my Opera 8.5 not.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
That is the response you will get from the majority of people doing web pages. Aside from the professionally developed commercial web developers, lets be honest.... About 1/3 of my neighbors have their own website. And their response would be just as it is in the subject. I think the majority of people just use Yahoo pagebuilder, or Dreamweaver, then are amazed when the first page with "My Dog Skip" comes up in the browser.
AS far as I remember konqueror CVS correctly renders ACID2 now. According to the CVS-digest the other week anyway, I haven't run it myself yet.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Repeat after me, please: correlation does not imply causation.
I'm amazed that we haven't seen almost the same answer from every pro commenting in this thread: standards are a means to an end. If following W3C standards does gain you better search engine placement, or cut down your bandwidth, knock yourself out. And of course, if following W3C standards means your site renders better for people you care about (which isn't necessarily everyone with a web browser) then go for it. But don't follow W3C standards, or anyone else's, dogmatically. Always know why following a particular standard will help you.
Personally, I do try to keep the code for the site I run valid, but that's more because the benefits above do apply to me (for example, my server logs tell me around 1/3 of my visitors are using a Gecko-based browser) than anything else.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Since Opera 9 is the only browser to pass the ACID2 test, is strict compliance really necessary?
2 15227).
Only? Opera wasn't even the first (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/28/1
I think konqueuror was second. I guess someone cares. Probably everyone except MS. That would be about par for the course.
On the one hand, I've taken alot of care to make sure my site displays consistently on IE/Gecko/Opera (sorry KHTML, go Win32 and we'll see) and that the Javascript executes properly as well. It's an ongoing battle, not just because of differences but also other browsers' attempts to emulate IE and thwarting some checks in the process. All in all, the goal is to shoot for a page that renders OK in an IE/NN 3.0 era browser but takes advantages of a little bit of well tested CSS where it's available.
On the other hand, the official validator sometimes barfs over that approach. IE (and others) have supported a handful of non-standard tags for several major versions now. Some of these are supplanted by CSS...and the validator takes every opportunity to bitch about them. The examples that comes to mind first are how to do a fixed background image and specifying script language rather than type. I'm sure eventually it'll have a fit over me using tables instead of divs for layout too.
So, yes, while I shoot for full HTML 4.0 validation, I refuse to shut out perfectly good browsers made in the same timeframe by relying entirely on poorly-defined, poorly-supported CSS. In all honesty, as the last major revision of HTML, every browser released in the 21st century should be able to handle it...if they can't, well, that's their problem.
I manage a pretty high volume medical related website which is 100% fully XHTML compliant. There are a few ASP.NET application on the site which do not validate, though when we move to ASP.NET 2.0 they finally will (don't get me started on ASP.NET and standards please. I didn't choose the tech). We've done this for a number of reasons, but the main ones are:
- The site uses CSS for layout purposes. This has been tested in all major browsers and downgrades gracefully. If the HTML is not valid, the CSS can go bonkers in some browsers, having the site valid means we know that the testing we did before will hold true for new pages, as long as we stick to the predefined HTML elements we tested.
- Having every page on the site be XML means we can use all the standard XML tools on the pages, such as XSL to push the content into different formats, or DOM or XPATH to pull content from the pages for any number of reasons. You could do this with regex or some HTML parser, but having it be valid XML makes this infinitely simpler.
- Lastly...if you don't even have the attention to detail to even be running the HTML Validator extension and glance down at the little icon in the corner as you write pages, then you won't ever work for me. It's really not so hard.
FWIW, server-side XSLT isn't particularly complicated. I'm just shifting a medium-sized site (maybe 100 unique pages) for a club I belong to onto a new host, and I set up all the necessary processing within an hour or two. For the benefit of being able to see/control the actual XHTML that you're shipping to browsers, IMHO it's more than worth it.
We've been using this approach through three generations of the site now, and I find it strange that anyone still uses things like Frontpage or Dreamweaver. They seem like children's toys in comparison to what you can do with the XSLT - and let's face it, XSLT isn't exactly the world's best programming language!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I code to the standard and find if I adhere to it I can usually use the same javascript & css for IE + mozilla based browsers with little problems. I do use the validator and find that if everything is valid (HTML, CSS, etc), the site performs more reliably; ie. I spend less time chasing down spurious problems.
Do I care? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. Thanks for asking!
Next question, please.
"This website is W3C compliant, if it does not look right please install a W3C compliant webbrowser."
...and now I'll be flamed out of the sky for this... so I'll post it AC...
No need for the "This site is best viewed by a XXX", no need for test against 3 or 5 different browsers...
--
I can't even believe this is being brought up. Of course it's important! Without having defined standards, the browser implementors have nothing to work towards. Remember the blink tag? That's what happens when you don't have standards! Remember ActiveX & how you can't run Windows Update using Firefox? That's what happens when you don't follow standards. It's infuriating. If we're ever going to make our jobs & lives easier, we need to get more people on the W3C bandwagon! (and I need to finally buck-up and finish making my homepage compliant)
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
Of course - some browsers fails anyway, but in that case it is more a problem of the browser than anything else. If it is a major browser that fails (usually IE) then there are ways around that problem, and maybe your design is formally correct, but not semantically correct. Designing a web page is like writing - you can mix words wildly and get a grammatically correct sentence, but it may come out as complete nonsense.
And if you still have problems with a browser - use a warning on your web page that indicates that the browser in question doesn't adhere to standards.
One example is Internet Explorer (at least up to version 6, I don't know about IE7) that can't handle transparent PNG images. Looks like shit if you use transparent PNG:s and IE. And in that case it isn't even in the scope of W3C.
So adhering to standards and using the validation tools available will be counted as "best effort". By testing against a certain browser and accepting the layout as acceptable is way below "best effort" since what will happen if the browser is updated and it then provides a different result?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
When I assisted in developing phpWebsite the project leader stressed that the entire site be w3c and bobby compliant. Web developers forget that there are people who need a text-to-speech reader or braille pad to browse the internet. It may be a small part of your audience but it is something to consider. Alternative human interfaces depend on standards.
Bobby:
-------------------
http://webxact.watchfire.com/
As the president and chief designer of my young web design business... I feel that my first priority is the presentation of my client's websites. Their clients won't know (much less care) if my client's site is W3C validated. Now, with that said, I have modified my coding habits to resolve the vast majority of nitpicky things that the validators balk at. Things like closing tags in a different order than they were opened... using
instead of
... not closing tags at all... that kind of stuff. Once the site presents perfectly, I do go back, and make the site validate. However, I haven't bothered to notify my clients. If they get curious and run my work through a validator, they'll be even more pleased with their purchase.
people are put off by xslt, i don't understand why
it's the best "secret" in web development i have ever come across
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There are a few errors in this summary, and I'll try to address them one-by-one.
Opera 9 is not "the only browser to pass the ACID2 test". Safari passed it first, followed by iCab, then Konqueror, and Firefox recently passed it in the reflow branch that will be incorporated into Firefox 3 (the next version of Firefox to have any significant layout engine improvements).
That said, the Acid2 test certainly does not imply standards compliance. It really doesn't test that many things, and I can tell you right now that Safari's layout engine is overall buggier than Firefox and Opera. Even things like background images don't work properly in certain not uncommon situations (when the background is set to no-repeat, positioned off the side of the box, and the box is smaller than the single non-repeating image, Safari will actually repeat the background).
It does not remain to be seen whether IE7 is better. The current IE7 beta is feature complete, and the IE developers have said many times that the layout engine won't be changed before the final release. I've thoroughly tested the IE7 beta and added the information to my standards support tables. The overall CSS 2.1 support went from 52% to 55%, compared to Firefox and Opera which both have 93%, and the only CSS 3 additions were the four new basic selectors. HTML and DOM support did not change significantly.
As far as developing websites, for me it's always been easiest to write to the standards first so that it'll work nearly perfectly in just about everything first go, and then add a layer of hacks for Internet Explorer and maybe a tweak here and there for other browsers. The Internet Explorer developers have made it clear that they intend to "build a platform that fully complies with the appropriate web standards", so if you continue to develop on a browser-by-browser basis from the start, you'll have to continue rewriting a lot of your site every time a new version of IE or something comes out with fixes for the bugs you're leaning on. Bill Gates himself said that they plan to release a new version of Internet Explorer every 9 to 12 months.
but i'm not doing THAT much wacky stuff, except for one thing:
;-)
;-)
you take your average tree, like say a discussion thread on slashdot, stored in a flat file in a database
the way it is stored, each record has a parent property, so you can rebuild the tree... but that's laborious
to rebuild the tree from that flat table, you have to run a bunch of queries:
select all records with root as parent
go to first record
select all records with first record as parent
go to the first subrecord
select all records...
etc., until you traverse all records
you can see this can get draining on the server side
but with xslt, you can just send the whole big dumb flat file to the client as flat no-effort xml, easy
and have the CLIENT rearrange those records into the tree with xslt
man i love that shit
frankly i'm getting to the point where i want to program all business logic and formatting at the client, and have the web server be just a thin wrapper (for security and authentication) around the database. so that your webserver is doing little more than retrieving and storing records
no asp, no php, no jsp pages
your web server = your database server
man i love that model
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A friend of mine is using ClearSilver templates and CGI mode Python to render his site, and it validates W3C with no problems.
antipaucity
There's an important difference between complying with standards and just rendering properly in a browser. For example, look at this page in IE and then Mozilla/Firefox. Firefox renders the page as it were coded. IE renders the page and says "Whoops, I see your tables aren't closed properly....Let me get that for you." Your pages don't have to be 100% compliant, but at LEAST code them so they will render properly. IE does too much of the clean up work for sloppy coders. If you have align="middle" on a in IE, it will center the text in the cell for you even though this is incorrect code. "middle" is used for valign. I'm sure there are many more little quirks like this in IE.
I thought Konqueror was, since Safari is based on Konqueror's khtml. Which Apple has to contribute changes back to.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
While the browser situation is aweful presently, standards are imperative. Being that I formerly worked site redesigns for academic institutions, I found that web sites in this scenario are particularly scrutinized for meeting standards. However, the difficulties we encountered were due to the fact that a content management system was typically in place, so not all of the content was checked against W3C standards. All we could do is ensure the home page and the top 2 to 3 teirs of content validated, and hope that the proper emphasis on W3C standards, styles guides, and accessibility practices included in training was enough to get most content providers to get it right from the start. The most problematic areas were always where content providers simply copied and pasted from Microsoft Word documents (which we all know generates revolting markup) without using the tools (that they were trained to use) in the CMS to reformat the markup.
It looks like you are saying that IE is more standards compliant than anything else, but you are not. As you admit:
and that
I'm glad you made that so clear. The mainstream Microsoft browser is a five and a half year old piece of shit because Microsoft wasted all of their time on Active Desktop, DRM and other lock in garbage instead of real standards, speed, stability or security. For a minute, it looked like you were saying the opposite because you have some ancient hatred of Netscape or something.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
How a site is coded is often driven by the Customer Service department. If a page is compliant with the W3C standard, but SomeBrowser doesn't render the page correctly or pukes, Customer Service (NOT the web development dept.) will get a call saying "your site is broken." Customer Service isn't about to say "SomeBrowser that 79% of the world uses is broken" because that will be seen as insulting the customer, so the developer will be told "make it work with SomeBrowser," not "make it 100% W3C standards compliant."
It's all about PERCEPTION. ROI has nothing to do with it.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
No you're missing (or attempting to dodge) the point:
Complaining that a browser released in 2001 - and that's had almost no standards-related bug fixes since then - is much worse than a browser that's been through constant maintenance since then is not exactly surprising, irrelevant of the fact that it's from Microsoft.
So rather than just acknowledge the unsurprising truth, you choose to judge browsers by their release date instead of by the actual date now, in the real world. That's like saying:
All you've done is moved the amazement from "MSIE 6 is amazingly buggy" to "it's amazing that a multi billion dollar company can't keep up with a bunch of volunteers."As far as anyone actually developing cross browser web sites is concerned, the effect is exactly the same.
Soft-hyphen support doesn't seem like a big deal if you're working in English, but to Germans it's a very big deal indeed. This bug has gone unfixed for five years, And the weird thing is that much much harder problems related to CSS rendering have been flattened with ease.
I dispute this, on the grounds that it hasn't been fixed. The code is, after all, open source, and there are a large number of talented programmers who speak Germanic languages. If it were as big of a deal as you suggest, and as much easier than the "much harder problems that have been flattened with ease," why hasn't anyone stepped up and fixed it?
The whole point of open source is that people focus their efforts on the bugs that matter to them. If no one addresses a bug, that means that there wasn't anyone who found it important enough to fix.
--MarkusQ
Priority 2: Make it compliant.
Since over 80% of our traffic is IE6 we optimize all our sites for it when we're trying to meet a deadline or just get something over with. If we have time, or if the client requests, we make our sites W3C. But like the post points out -- why bother with standards complience if nothing supports a standard.
Find Escorts, Strippers, Massage Parlours, Swingers
Our shop designs everything to W3C standards; exactly which DTD depends on the project. We find validation and standards compliance critical to: our QA; debugging dynamic pages; sane site maintenance; making CSS only designs work correctly; supporting WAI/508; having any confidence the site will function with next year's browser versions (or the next decades?).
It is so second nature here, it would feel like publishing a book without proof-reading to do otherwise.
It looks like you are saying that IE is more standards compliant than anything else, but you are not.
Well, no, it only looks like that if you don't pay attention. What I'm saying is that IE was more standards compliant than anything else, as evidenced by the bolded bit:
Every web browser released by Microsoft from IE3 onwards has been more standards-compliant than any Netscape browser released around the same time.
The mainstream Microsoft browser is a five and a half year old piece of shit because Microsoft wasted all of their time on Active Desktop, DRM and other lock in garbage instead of real standards, speed, stability or security. For a minute, it looked like you were saying the opposite because you have some ancient hatred of Netscape or something.
UUUHHNNN! MICROSOFT BAD! NETSCAPE GOOD! BASH MICROSOFT, BASH!!!
Aside from the bizarre idea that Bill Gates said "Hey guys, let's spend the next five years creating shitty stuff that everyone hates to the exclusion of everything else," you might want to realise that sometimes big companies do both bad things and good things, irrelevant of whether they are Microsoft or Netscape.
The whole reason for my initial comment, in case you missed it, was to dispute the idea that Microsoft was somehow the bad standards-breaking browser maker in the midst of a bunch of angels, which is demonstrably bullshit. But hey, we're criticising Microsoft here, and they're always evil, right? So don't let facts get in the way or anything, please...
Web standards are well-documented, and have validators that can help you catch some subtle mistake that might not break anything on your system, but could cause major problems under other conditions. It just seems a more natural target than any individual browser to me. Plus, coding to the standard is the best way to ensure that your site *mostly* works on really fringe browsers.
If you end up having to take a step or two away from the standards to support a major browser (usually IE, but it's really not too terrible anymore), then it's no big deal, and once you've worked on a couple complex sites you end up with a pretty good idea of where the problem areas are and how to fix them in the most compliant way possible. Hopefully some day this process won't be necessary, but I'm not holding my breath.
So: Start from the standard, then test from there until you end up with something that works everywhere you need. Definitely a lot simpler than it used to be in the days of having to support IE3 and NS4.
Game... blouses.
For my personal site, I couldn't care less if it follows any standard at all. I made it to facilitate certain things. If it follows any standard, it's entirely by fluke and not by any conscious effort on my part. But, hey, it does what I want it to, and that's good enough for me.
Suggestion to W3C: a scoring system of A (green), B (orange) & C (red) to grade how a site is compliant to W3C standard. Web developer can then put up a w3c logo (with grade) on their website to announce thier compliance. Probably only those sites with A rating will want display it. Scoring system is self-help from W3C web site. And these w3c logo is hyperlink back to w3c to verify the grade. And hopefully this is will encourage more web devloper to write proper codes!
CSS is great, if you understand how to do styles in MS Word (oh, OK then, or your favourite OS equivalent), then you can understand how to do CSS, and make your site look better, load faster, and be easier to maintain.
As for HTML 4.0/XHTML 1.0/XHTML 1.1, it's probably worth it to validate, but if some entity isn't in the DTD, who cares? If you drop in a <br> or <img> instead of <br /> or <img />, who cares? It might not future proof your page, but it's highly unlikely in 50 years "HTML readers" won't be able to render a page that renders now. I believe that people who harp on about HTML standards compliance are just being show-offs, anyone who can code better than 95% of the population can do it (if you want to), which is anyone who codes, and if you can't you're just one of these people's long suffering class-mates. Also, a lot of the site spruiking Standards Compliance say that their effect works in Mozilla and not in IE because Mozilla is standards compliant, but sometimes it's hard to tell if their not finding quirks in Mozilla's interpretation of the standards.
As for layout not using tables, tables allow you to do reasonably complicated layouts in a consistent way across browsers. The only way to do it with divs is with float (basically abusing the intention of float, but it does work) or absolute positioning, where you can't create liquid layouts (100% screen width) without resorting to JavaScript. Not good enough, screen readers and mobile devices can deal with tables. That said, you can put your navigation at the bottom of the code but at the top of the rendered page with absolute positioning, which can aid in Search Engine Optimization.
Damn, I already moderated this topic. Now I'll have to log in with my sock puppet to comment.
I used to work for a commercial web design company. Our server language was Cold Fusion, we also used some Flash, plenty of CSS, and a bit of javascript. Most of our websites had two versions, one that cut out all the Flash for slow connections. We never followed standards to a T, and didn't use a parser. We did however try to follow standards when possible, but the ultimate test came when we thought we were done with a web page. We had multiple versions of IE, Netscape/Mozilla, and Opera as well as the latest version of some lesser known to the masses browsers. We then had a human go through and do QA checks on every page we produced in every browser we cared about. We checked that all functionality worked as well as load times on broadband and dial up (yes we even cared about those people). Ultimately our customers wanted a product that was useable and worked. Most of our customers had no idea what standards existed for web content, nor did they care. The bottom line is customer satisfaction, and that generally consists of delivering a working product. Of course you need to account for future browsers and that sort of thing, and that is something where following standards is intended to ensure the site you created 6 months ago works with the latest version of a browser (of course this guarantees nothing as I'm sure the slashdot community knows all too well). So as in all things doing your best and a little bit of luck is the best you could hope for. Ultimately I think making a best attempt to follow standards is a good thing from a development point of view, but in the real world it doesn't always work.
It only conjecture, but in general, common knowledge:
v e-my-google-pagerank.html- rank-and-the-epicenter-of-hold-em-t/l
http://www.econsultant.com/google/i-want-to-impro
http://www2.jeffcroft.com/2004/aug/09/google-page
http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/05/28/cost.htm
Pretty much my first priority is to make the websites display correctly in the most popular browsers. It just isin't worth my time to worry about how it displays in the less popular browsers. And then I put the code through the W3C Validator. Mostly for error checking and such. I just consider it a bonus if it validates correctly while displaying correctly. If for any reason I have invalidate some code to make it work in one of the "popular" browsers, then by all means I will. I just don't think enough people care about whether your website validates or not to even worry about it.
There are 4 valid content types for xhtml, one of which is text/html. Just because it won't be treated as xhtml anymore, doesn't mean its not a valid content type.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/
So you understood the post, yet still replied precisely as if you had not. And you actually say it. So you go off on your rant, even though you understood perfectly what the OP was saying. But you simply cannot miss a chance to say "piece of shit", can you?
It would be lazy and irresponsible to ignore the standards just so your site displays correctly. Sure the browsers don't necesarily live up to them in all regards, but a skilled developer can usually have W3C compliant code that renders correctly.
Just because the browsers don't follow the standards (or implement them incorrectly), doesn't mean developer's shouldn't.
Standards compliance is pointless unless the standards are supported. Give me a guarantee that valid documents will be rendered correctly and I'll be glad to stop using the guess-and-check method. It rather makes me feel like a C++ programmer anyway.
If I had any mod points atm, I'd mod the parent up. It hits the nail squarely on the head (and since it's a nail, using a hammer is fully justified).
At the risk of being redundant after 6 pages of comments.
How do I mark the story itself as a -1, Troll?
I can't seem to find the moderation or the tagging option. For the story.
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
This is the poorest excuse for an article I've seen on Slashdot in a while. Not only is it a rehash of an argument that's been going on for years, it doesn't even get its facts straight regarding the ACID2 test.
5 _04.html#008042
e ror-pass-acid2/
o rted-in-opera-one-year-later/
o x-acid2-compliance-on-its-way/
Opera9 isn't the only browser to pass the ACID2 test. Hell, it's not even the first.
Safari passed on April 27, 2005:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/200
iCab passed in June, 2005, followed closely by Konqueror:
http://www.webstandards.org/2005/06/07/icab-konqu
Beta builds of Opera were next on March 28, 2006:
http://www.webstandards.org/2006/03/28/acid2-supp
A development branch of Firefox showed compliance on April 13, 2006:
http://www.thinklemon.com/weblog/2006/04/13/firef
The funniest one is that someone cheated and got Firefox to pass last May:
http://annevankesteren.nl/2005/05/greasemonkey
Forget all of that stuff about how it looks on 8 versions of 3 browsers on 2 platforms. Section 508 ignorance can at best bring you a few wxtra customers. At worst, it can bring you a few extra lawsuits.
... if other people dont care.
but yeah i care and find it easier to debug.
In short I don't think its possible to write a standards compliant page and have it display in IE properly, as long as this situation persists, it will be impossible to push "standards" on the internet. If the standards don't display correctly on 90% of the computers, what are you supposed to do?
I do the same thing I've always done: a nice design for the browsers that can handle it, and a bare-bones design for people with braindead browsers. These days, you can make a single HTML file, and serve up different CSS depending on the browser, so it's even easier than it used to be.
The only difference between now and 10 years ago is that the braindead browser is called "IE" instead of "Mosaic".
People with IE can still view my pages; they're just not as pretty as they could be. They can always upgrade to a browser that can render CSS better than a hill of beans -- this is my little incentive for them. (You wanted to know how standards could be pushed on the internet.)
After all, who visits a webpage just to see the pretty drop-shadows and mouseover effects? You come for the information. It's still there. I'm not going to bend over backwards making my page look "cool" for a browser that nobody I know uses.
As it turns out, you are wrong. The HTML spec says: ­ indicates and optional line break; browsers are not required to break at ­, but if they do they need to display a hyphen.
Mozilla follows the semantics as specified. In fact, despite the fact that you may prefer MSIE's implementation, it is arguably incorrect given the ambiguous/conflicting specifications for the character and its semantics.
--MarkusQ
The W3C initiative started out as a concern that geeky sites were fine for, well, geeks but there are a lot of people out there from blind and sight-limited users to more people who just can't stand or get their heads around the shoddy interfaces of poorly designed sites... Thee is nothing on this thread so far about how you address this. Yes many badly designed sites are popular but that doesn't make it right that a substantial proportion of users, or potential users, are effectively locked out because good, accessible design was never thought about at the beginning or, at best, was just a few tweaks bolted on at runtime. The big advantage for Microsoft over OSS is precisely that they can act as a single interlocutor with blind and disabled associations, something the OSS community cannot provide: to paraphrase Kissinger: I'll work with the OSS community if you can give me their phone number... Microsoft does actually test much of its software with such groups but I've yet to see anyone promoting OSS solutions to take that trouble. Call it a market grab if you will, but it seems to make good business sense as well as being "politically correct".
I've recently seen at least two posts that were so mind-blowingly awesome that it seemed like a crime to group them together with ok-but-nothin'-too-special +5 posts. An exponential moderation system would be great--2 points to go to from +5 to +6, 3 to go from +6 to +7, etc. Modding down will work as usual, so there really wouldn't be much room for abuse.
If site is standards compliant it is up to client browser to handle it.
So, that guy/gal better update to latest IE or something to see it right. Yes, while there is some PNG bla bla all over, IE renders w3c site and pages perfectly. Not saying it passes Acid 2 monster.
Care about standards, ignore browsers.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
writing standard compliant code is easy, just boycott IE. who in their right mind would use that crap anyway ;)