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

Answer 1

Very important. Accessibility, usability, portability, it's the law (in some instances), scalability, easier to integrate with various application frameworks and CMSes. The list goes on but other posters have covered the points well enough.

Your average business owner typically says "who cares" much like the OP. My most effective response thus far has been "the Google bot is nothing more than a blind end user. Don't you want it to list your site effectively?"

Answer 2

Ultimately, a standard is meant provide convenience to the developers. By being "standard", it acts as a proxy for a set of disparate requirements, so if you follow the standard:

• know your code will work across different technologies (browser, platforms, versions)
• know your code will work for different people (accessibility)
• client accepts your code based on that fact (project requires standards compliance)
• other stuff I'm not thinking of

The track record of "saving us time" for web standards is pretty mixed: we'd often spend hours fighting to get validation, only to find out browsers don't support the standards. For me, getting pages to validate usually does save time.

Back to the question at hand: when to use them. Here's my pragmatic take: take another look at your requirements (in terms of browsers, platforms, versions, accessibility). Compare the approach of aiming for all those vs. aiming for a standard plus whatever the standards lack. Is adding a "standard" to the list of requirements save you time, or just add another burden to completing the project?

Answer 3

Browsers and other web-based readers rely on developers to follow standards and for the most part it's not hard to adhere to them. So just do the best you can but don't make yourself unproductive to follow them.

Answer 4

I find that HTML validation can be handy UP TO A POINT.

After that point (i.e. where validation takes over from common sense) it becomes a hindrance, I believe that validation is a very useful DEVELOPMENT tool but it is not necessary to comply 100%, For example the XHTML Strict specification deprecates the target="" selector, thus making it not validate, but it still works perfectly, to achieve the same action without using the above code requires javascript code to the effect:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
    $('a').each(function(){
        if (($(this).attr('rel')=='external') || 
            ($(this).attr('rel')=='nofollow')) 
        {
             $(this).attr('target','_blank');
        }
    });
});

Now to implement the above rather than the simple target="" defies logic and good programming, CSS on the other hand usually does have to validate but there are exceptions; browser hacks and vendor specific tags, which in the current browser climate are a necessary evil, it will make your code invalid, but it WILL work in most major browsers, so it's really up to you, you can go for 100% compliance and jump through hoops to have a nice little badge on your site that says "XHTML Valid" or "HTML5 Valid" or whatever, or you can have a neat, functional and clean coded site that just works.

P.S. Before I get flamed and called hypocritical yes I do have one on my personal blogging site but my code isn't valid at the moment anyway.

Further reading: http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/but-it-doesnt-validate/