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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.
IIRC, Opera 9 is not the only compliant browser. I believe Safari 2 is also compliant.
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.
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.
Look again.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
You're asking the wrong question. It's not about replacing <table> elements with <div> elements. It's about using the most appropriate element type and leaving the presentation up to CSS. Sometimes that means using a <table> element, sometimes that means using a <div> element, and sometimes it means using something completely different, like <ul>.
The thing is, it's not easier or cleaner. In fact, it's usually the opposite. With CSS, you develop the layout code once, and apply it to all the pages on your site simultaneously. With tables, you have to hack up stupid <tr>s and <td>s for each and every page you do. Mindless, boring, repetitive work.
This sentence makes no sense. Semantics describe what individual parts of the page mean and are encoded with HTML elements. They have nothing to do with the layout or CSS. Why would "floating something in a strange way" be semantically wrong? Floating things happens on a completely different conceptual level to the semantics. On the other hand, describing something as a table, when it's really a heading or an image, is obviously semantically wrong.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Aside from the all-important issue of "does it look right?", there is the professional issue of what sort of standards you should apply to your work. It's difficult to come close to a more extensive (and yet simple to implement) baseline metric of quality control with HTML/CSS than the W3C parser. Sure, I could go through and decide how I am going to do everything, but that's time-intensive and inflexible. Running something through the parser gives me a fast and consistent report. I can do whatever I want with the results, but they are there.
It does not solve problems for you or guarantee much of anything, but it allows you to see your formatting code in a more objective way. As a bonus, it can help you spot potential problems, mistakes, and open your eyes to some of the structure you are relying upon.
I always use the Tidy Firefox extension. It is a little friendlier than the online W3C parser interface. Disclaimer: not a professional web designer.
Actually, it's HTML that has semantics, XML is just a markup syntax, so it's definitely about marking information up precisely.
Yes, and in order to decide upon the best presentation, a user-agent (e.g. a browser) needs to know what kind of information it is getting. Hence marking up tables as tables, headings as headings, and lists as lists, not marking up everything as tables.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Changing the size of the window has similar effects. Konqueror is exhibiting correct behavior; the test wasn't designed to keep the face constant after scrolling or forcing the browser to adjust the positioning by resizing the window. It's just supposed to display correctly after you click on the link that jumps you down to the face.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
The latest version of Safari is Safari 2.0.3. It's not in beta, and has been available to users since Mac OS X Tiger was released. It's not available for download from the Apple site, for the same reason many other Apple applications aren't available for download--current applications come as part of the operating system, and are automatically updated via Apple's Software Update. If a user needs to reinstall, they are suppose to go back to the OS disk.
I should also mention that if you perform a search for Safari on the Apple Support website, you will also get a link to Safari 1.3.2 and Safari 2.0.1 both newer versions than the one you pointed to, which is legacy software.
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.
Please, please *don't* write HTML as if it's XHTML. Self-closing tags in HTML is totally invalid and screws up the parsers. Pretend you're a HTML (not XML) parser and parse:
<html><body><script src="..."/>Lots of stuff</body></html>
Your <script> tag never gets closed (remember, this is *not* XML!). Wee, no content....
If you are actually sending it with some sort of XML MIME type, yes, go ahead and do self-closing tags. Just don't pretend it works when you're being HTML.
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?
The problem isn't HTML vs. XHTML and passing self-closing tags as HTML, the problem is that 99.999% of people using XHTML content in their pages, are not sending the proper XHTML Content-type for those pages.
There is ONLY ONE valid Content-type for XHTML content, and that is application/xml+xhtml, not text/html.
Thankfully, MSIE doesn't even support XHTML at all, so we're safe there... for now.
This writeup is very clear on the matter.
I'm working on a redesign of a site that is a perfect example of what happens when you let developers write code that "just works". Our pages are served out of a CMS that is provided by a little company in the Pacific Northwest that you may or may not have heard of (the name starts with 'M' and ends with 'icrosoft'). The templates we currently use are the bastard child of using their out-of-the-box output methods combined with template designers who used every table and spacer widget trick in the box to deliver their templates in as short a time frame as possible.
According to half the comments I've read in this thread, this is how it should be: we should be focused on the end result for the user, and to hell with standards; they're nothing but esoteric junk that waste back-end developers' precious time.
Of course, this great time-saving philosophy has resulted in the following results:
Now, as I said, we've been developing a redesign around standards that should improve our lot in life significantly, and our conclusions have been based on data, not a BS meme.