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.
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
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.
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.
More specifically, if you run the article page through the validator it fails with 60 errors. The truth is that the vast majority of pages out there will fail. It's a catch-22: as long as browsers are not compliant, web-pages won't be compliant... and as long as web-pages are not compliant, what's the point in standards-compliant browsers?
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.
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.
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