How important is it to follow web standards? [closed]

Answer 1

The thing about these big sites is that they have an army of programmers to guarantee that the site keeps working.

Do you? Are you willing to spend your money on that?

The problem with not following the standards is that you have no guarantees of how your site is going to work in tomorrows browsers.

Then there are other issues, like accessibility, or enabling automated tools to parse your site. Whether this is search engine web crawlers or sites aggregating information available from microformats, or screen readers for blind people or any of the dozens of other tools that need to be able to read your site, you've no guarantees they'll be able to parse your site if it's a random tag soup.

Then there are the tools that you yourself us. Will jQuery or other javascript libraries be able to figure out your weird non-standard DOM? Maybe, maybe not. Will next week's version? Who knows?

And finally, what is the cost? It's not that hard to write compliant HTML/CSS. It takes some practice to figure out some of the CSS tricks to avoid relying on deprecated or nonstandard HTML, but once you've figured it out, it's just as easy to write as your typical sloppy nonstandard code. And of course it may even make things easier, because it allows you to meaningfully use tools like the HTML validator when debugging. It's hard to use that for anything useful if your site contains 50 HTML errors in any case. Which one of them, if any, is related to the problem you're trying to fix?

Answer 2

As a side note - it's not a great effort to follow web standards. When you get used to it, you quickly notice how much of an effort it is not to do so. Using web stadnards usually produces LESS code (= less time to write), MORE READABLE code and "future-proof" code compared to whatever oldschool layout-technique you want to use instead.

Answer 3

W3C validation is an important factor to take into consideration when you are on the lookout for errors that break your site's functionality (or ones that might potentially break something). It's something of a radar that might detect errors before they start breaking your work.

For instance, if you have a problem with your site and want to post a question on SO about it, you're well advised to use the W3C validator and make sure it doesn't point you to the source of your problem.

But... not all HTML will validate. The most important, though not the only case is probably HTML5. In CSS, vendor prefixes will not validate either. Does that mean you shouldn't use them? Not at all!

Validation services are a great thing to find that mistyped attribute name, unclosed tag, missing semicolon or a <br> tag with an XHTML doctype. I wouldn't worry about elements that don't validate just because the validator doesn't know what the <video> tag does. This is still correct.

Answer 4

Well, as you said, most large websites don't follow standard, so if you want a large website, you'd better not follow the standards. :)

But no, it's best to follow standards, because that will give you the biggest change that your site will function on most browsers, and will continue to function on most future browsers too for a very long time.

There are some exceptions, and they mainly occur because of some browsers (or some versions of browsers) not following standards. Therefor, you might sometimes need some tricks or hacks to get your site to function in all browsers you want to support. Most of these tricks can be applied while still following standards, but some others may lead to better performance or easier implementation or maintenance.

So while it's best to follow standards in general, there could always be one or two exceptions...

Answer 5

STANDARDS!

A Bit of History

Before going straight to the answer, I believe it is important to state the context of the latest standard.

Did you know that the W3C had been trying to develop a XHTML 2 standard? If it would have came out it wouldn't be backward compatible with previous versions of HTML. In fact, a rebellion formed within the W3C and ended with a group that simply part ways to create the WHATWG. The WHATWG are the real master minds behind HTML5.

Have you ever ask yourself why it takes so much time to get standards from the WC3? The way WC3 works is very democratic. They discuss everything until everyone accepts. The WHATWG does this with a little twist: issues are raised and discussed, but the final word rests with the editor. To quote Jeremy Keith: "While HTML5 was being developed at the WHATWG, the W3C continued working on XHTML 2. It would be inaccurate to say it was going nowhere fast. It was going nowhere very, very slowly."

It ended up with the W3C dropping XHTML 2 and instead of going from scratch they took the decision to work with the WHATWG, after all.

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The Return of Spaghetti Markup?

While HTML5 is no longer strict like XHTML, it does not mean that there are no longer good coding practices. HTML5 is not machiavellian. Unlike XHTML 2, it builds upon existing specs (supports existing content).

Above all, the arbiters behind the specs are the different browser vendors. Have you ever seen proprietary CSS elements with webkit (Safari, Chrome), moz (Firefox) or o (Opera)? This is actually normal to have because that means the vendors are working forward on upcoming specs and sometimes on functionalities that are out of the specs. For a while, Microsoft had the mentality of being above standards because they had the monopoly on the browser shares and created their own CSS elements. Microsoft created CSS elements such as filter and yet we find something peculiar. There are two recommandations for the specs which are two different ways of playing with opacity in CSS: RGBA in the color element and the opacity element.

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The Importance of Standards

To finish, I would say that web designers/developers have a big responsibility to stay up to date with what is going on in terms of technology and standards such as HTML5. That doesn't mean to read every single spec out there. I agree that this would be long and boring. Actually, read books on the subject, follow the browser vendor's dev blogs and have fun from time to time by trying stuff out. I no longer agree with following 100% of all the web standards because there will always be exceptions. I prefer using good coding practices that will help developers, but that will at the same time be browser friendly. It is important to understand that HTML5 builds upon existing standards and it is made to support existing content.

One last opinion: http://dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

Answer 6

It depends upon the size of your audience. If it's for your blog, you can be pretty sloppy. I've done government websites, however, where it was critically important that we follow web standards and follow accessibility guidelines.

But yeah, just do it. Why wouldn't you?