Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
nope.
Sure that makes sense in theory, but in practice it probably doesn't.
"Preview" is the Slashdot equivalent to the W3C validator.
-Peter
Can you please explain your sig?
*sigh* back to work...
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
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
"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"
heh heh heh... 208 errors
+1 Insightful
Oh wait..