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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.
On a more serious note, the only way to solve the problem is to have browsers shame non-complient pages. Specifically, if IE7 displayed a dialog that said, "This web site is constructed improperly and might not work as expected" every time it hit an invalid page, things would change VERY FAST.
No, I will not work for your startup
I'd be more inclined to follow the standards if the standards didn't suck. For instance, CSS is incapable of doing simple math. (Why can't I make a measure 5em+10 pixels? Seems obvious to me, especially since em isn't a constant, but CSS won't do it.) Why is it so difficult to center something vertically? With tables, it was trivial, but with CSS it's significantly harder. (I haven't found a way of doing it with less than 2 divs.) Why do CSS measures typically go by *screen* measures and not *page* measures? When I say I want a div 10 pixels from the bottom, I don't mean the bottom of the screen, I mean the bottom of the entire page, idiots.
Anyway, CSS is just frustrating as hell to use. IMO, it's not significantly better than doing layout using tables. Especially since WYSIWYG editors will show you the table layout in progress, but usually choke on CSS layouts.
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It's a wee bit disingenuous to blame browsers for the lack of strictly validating web pages out there. I'd venture that upwards of 90% of the issues you see when you validate pages against the HTML 4.0 schema are not there because the author had to violate the standard in order to achieve the effect in some non-compliant browser. They are there because the author achieved the effect he wanted and did bother to check whether he had, or could, achieve it in a standards-compliant way. From the beginning, browsers tried to degrade gracefully in the face of invalid input, and as long they do that there will continue to be a lot of invalid input out there.
You sound clueless tbh, like all people who complain that making valid websites is "tooo haaaaaard!!!". If you need a validator to check bulleted lists and can't write js without errors then you are in the wrong job. Or you are the office gopher who just happens to also like playing with frontpage.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
Aaargh! You imply that developing a website using web standards takes longer. False! It _does_ require that you exercise more care.
Sorry. If you're doing something more complicated than building a 10-page static site, or even something with a little PHP-driven database, then it will take longer. It'll limit your choice of available third-party modules, and you'll have to evaluate each one you consider for its standards compliance. You'll have to hire more competent developers when you outsource. You may have to redesign legacy code that's already on the site (I've just finished doing this for a text-html autoformatter that was in use on a number of sites my company maintains, and which produced the most horribly non-standard html you can imagine rendering correctly -- two days' work, and if I hadn't been able to justify it in terms of being able to extend the range of formatting options it supports, I'd never have got the finance to do it).
If WAI is an issue, you'll have to examine the text that has been supplied by people other than yourself, going through it and putting expansions of abbreviations and acronyms in place for screen readers using ABBR and ACRONYM tags, for example.
And developing a CSS-based layout that fits the specification the graphic designer has handed to you, rather than a deprecated table-based one, is often quite tricky.
No, for anything beyond trivial requirements, meeting web standards can be time consuming. Sorry.