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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.
Write once, test everywhere.
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.
Because its one more thing you have to worry about and which you may not be able to justify to those you need to justify your time.
Why not write up a thick document that you may or may not need just because its "standard" in some programming methodology?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Wow, that would suck. Would you care to share this huge error with the rest of us? Or were you simply looking for some ill-gotten karma?