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.
IIRC, Opera 9 is not the only compliant browser. I believe Safari 2 is also compliant.
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.
Have you actually bothered to read the Acid2 page? Because I hear this repeated all the time, and it's downright misleading.
There is a checklist of about a dozen things the Acid2 page tests. Incorrect code is just one of them. It is necessary to include incorrect code in a test like this. How else are you going to check whether a browser follows the CSS error handling rules?
It's incorrect code, sure, but it's incorrect code that has a defined rendering according to the CSS specifications. It's not something a compliant browser would trip up on. There is a correct way to parse the incorrect code, and the Acid2 page tests to see if a browser parses it correctly - among many other things it tests for.
Where are you guys getting this idea that the Acid2 test is all about error handling? It's a very small part of the test, but plenty of Slashdotters seem convinced that the test revolves around broken code and nothing else. Was there a weekly meeting I missed wher eyou all got this myth drilled into your heads?
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.
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.
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.