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

Answer 1

If everything works in all the browsers you want to support, it's not really that important that HTML code actually validates. For XHTML, it is important, though: using XHTML implies that you want your code to be readable by XML parsers, so anything which isn't valid XHTML shouldn't be declared as such.

But creating standards-compliant code isn't hard, ie anyone who doesn't bother to fix errors shows a lack of professionalism. Sometimes one might decide to ignore the standards, but that should always be a concious decision - eg the Google home page is optimized for speed and cross-browser support and has been tested extensively. If you don't have the resources for such testing and continous support, you should stick with the standards.

Answer 2

The first thing I do is to test in my target environments. If it's working and fails to validate, it's probably a smaller point but naturally worth exploring. Course you do want to strive for accessibility as much as possible.

Answer 3

Does anyone here use Hotmail? Have you ever noticed that with each major Firefox release, Microsoft has to go back and make changes to their Hotmail website so that they won't be left behind in the latest Firefox release?

Would they have needed to do that if the developers respected standards? How much time/money would they save? How much of that time/money would they then be able to invest in newer technologies or new features?

You say that most of the major websites fail W3C's markup and CSS validation tests. Look at most of the websites. Do they look modern? Do they look like the ones that do validate? Are they the first to implement the latest and greatest features or are they stuck maintaining old and outdated technologies, feverishly and tirelessly trying to maintain a house of cards and hoping the winds of change won't knock it down?

There is an opportunity cost for every decision we make. Sometimes the opportunity cost of skipping a standard can forge a profitable business partnership. Other times, especially when standards aren't followed because of ignorance, the cost is being left behind because of bugs, random behavior, and guessing games. Sometimes, following standards can create a platform of extensibility where new features can be added for years to come.

Answer 4

If you follow the standards, any layout errors will be much easier to debug. When you ignore the standards, the browser can render your page however it feels like, and changing one character can completely change how your page is rendered. Debugging one browser is hard, but debugging IE 7, IE 6, Firefox, Opera, Safari... and ignoring the standards is just going to make your life difficult.

If you are using jQuery or other DOM manipulation libraries, you can get unexpected and inconsistent results if your markup is not valid.

So, don't waste your time. Make sure you write valid HTML and CSS. It's really really easy, and will save you time.

Answer 5

Break all the standards you want if you want to deliver your project NOW.

But adhere strictly to standards if you wished to deliver now and in the future (without any additional effort).

Answer 6

Here is my take on this question.

Firstly, I'll tackle this bit:

"I recently found out that most of the major websites fail W3C's markup and CSS validation tests. Therefore [...]"

Big companies can often suffer from paralysis, which makes it very hard to get even small changes made. In most cases, the practices of "big companies" are not a good example to follow. They are not "big companies" because they have a poorly constructed website - its the other way around. They become big, and to make a change to their website to fix a validation error becomes a longer and longer process that costs more and more money (with long lists of people who need to sign off the changes!)

Now let's move onto the next bit, without the baggage of big companies to worry about!

"[...] how important is it really to follow web standards?"

This can be answered in two contexts. I think the first paragraph probably applies to you as you are asking on Stack Overflow :)

If you are a professional web developer, you should always follow the standards unless explicitly requested not to do so (see 1)). The reasons you would do this are that being able to validate your mark-up, accessibility and browser-compatibility are part of the craft of creating professional websites.

If you are a subject-enthusiast (for example, an expert on rare insects) - it should be possible for you to publish a web page that contains terrible mark-up and browsers should all treat the errors in the same way - at the very least, everyone should be able to read the information. I mention this because the web is open to anyone to publish a web page - not just expert developers.

1) "explicitly requested not to do so" ? What on Earth does that mean. It means that it is possible to create a website that works in all browsers without following the standards. Google very deliberately use some very strange mark-up on their search page as discussed in this article:

http://www.stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Blog/Date/201008/Blog/Google-Deliberately-Write-Awful-HTML/