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.

Comments

Safari passes Acid2

[Pendersempai]

For what it's worth, I just ran the Acid2 test through Safari and it passed.

Re:Opera 9 and Safari 2 are both beta

[GeoffP]

Safari 2 is most definitely not beta. It's been released, it's in Software Update, it's included in every box of Tiger. Quite simply, that page is out of date.

Re:Opera 9 and Safari 2 are both beta

[nateziarek]

That's odd that Safari 1.2 is the download on that page...Safari 2.0.s is the most recent non-beta version, but it only works on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

n

Re:Opera 9 and Safari 2 are both beta

[Xyde]

Safari 2 is not beta, it's currently at version 2.0.3 and passes the Acid2 test fine.