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.
Sorry, but I can't follow the latest standards at my job. If I did, I'd block out a couple percentage points of the market, and at the volume my employer is working, that would be millions of dollars. Seriously: millions.
The latest standards aren't even that great from a purely academic standpoint, as sadly you can't achieve the same consistency in font sizing across browsers with CSS as you can with FONT SIZE. And CSS pages seem far more prone to overlapping elements than tabled layouts. But aside from that, even if we assume that the latest standards were perfection, they still don't work for a non-negligable percentage of users. The real "standard" is the user base, no matter what anyone likes to say.
If you're following the latest standards closely, you're probably not working at a company that is making good money on the internet as its primary income. And if you are, then you're costing yourself a heck of a lot of money and you better hope the shareholders don't find out.
Cheers.