Does anyone pay attention to standards?

[Isaac Grover]

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

Isaac

Are you losing $14,200.00 per year without your knowledge?
http://bigmoneyandfreetime.web1000.com

 

[Adrienne]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed) (Isaac Grover)
writing in

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at
the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds.
Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the
W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
at as guidlines for web design?

In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to better
results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are machines, have
no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look for logical, valid
markup.

 

[Matthias Gutfeldt]

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

Hehehe. Where have you been these last couple years, it's such an old topic!

W3C-compliant code is actually gaining popularity, due to some solid
promotional work by the W3C and other organisations, and due to the fact
that browsers are finally catching up with the standards.

But there are still a lot of people that seem to take pride in coding to
individual browser bugs instead of coding to reliable, stable standards.
I have no idea why they do that, there's no benefit to it (except that
they can make their clients pay for "updates" to "fix" the code when it
no longer works).

Here's a couple links about the benefits of web standards:

The Business Value of Web Standards
<http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000266.php>

What are the advantages of using web standards?
<http://webstandards.org/learn/faq/#p3>

The Business Benefits of Web Standards
<http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/why-web-standards/>

The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you!
<http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/benefits/>



Matthias

 

[Barry Pearson]

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages
at the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to
shreds. Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com,
etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
at as guidlines for web design?

Are you asking what people actually do, or what they should do? The answer are
probably different!

See:
http://www.ub.uib.no/elpub/2001/h/413001/
It describes some 2001 research using a robot to validate many pages found on
the web. Fewer than 1% validated as they were. If a Transitional DOCTYPE was
assumed for those without a DOCTYPE, the proportion was still less than 3%.
The paper (125 pages) categorises the problems.

I think the websites of members of W3C have similar issues. But I believe the
proportion that validate rises year by year.

I validate my pages, but more as a check of whether I am getting things right
than in the expectation that it will make a lot of difference to my audience.
They are almost certainly using browsers that can tolerate invalidate pages,
because of the above. (I use Dreamweaver, which reduces the number of possible
errors).

 

[Philipp Lenssen]

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages
at the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to
shreds. Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com,
etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
at as guidlines for web design?

"Anymore"? Who ever cared for web standards? Aside from some HTML
freaks like us. In any case, if you don't do it out of selfishness
(e.g. to better maintain your sources), don't do it at all. If
Microsoft gets it wrong, don't follow unless you feel it saves your
time to have crappy HTML. Most websites do, you are correct.

 

[Philipp Lenssen]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed) (Isaac
Grover) writing in

In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to
better results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are
machines, have no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look
for logical, valid markup.

No search engine would ever care for valid markup.
This is not to say totally broken links are helpful.
Accessibility, especially the what-to-do-with-blind-people or
what-to-do-with-javascript-disabled-browsers approaches help SEs a lot.

 

[Ulujain]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed) (Isaac Grover)
writing in



In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to better
results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are machines, have
no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look for logical, valid
markup.

Search engines usually index whatever their robots send back to them.
The engines themselves don't look for anything.

'Later
Peter

 

[Werner Partner]

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

Some weeks ago someone noticed that my pages are not valid, so I looked
it up and checked what is to be done. As I use a "standard frane"
programmed by php, I made this valid, and so _all_ my pages are valid.

Maybe that here ore there is something wrong, but if you find it I will
repair it

Werner

 

[Brian]

In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code
leads to better results in search engines.

That has certainly not been my experience. I did a new site for a
restaurant, using valid html 4.01 strict. It shows up 4th in Google for
"TS McHugh's" at the moment (it's been bouncing around a lot lately).
The old site is # 1 at the moment. It has dreadful markup like the
following for its header:

<td width="260" valign="top"><strong><font face="Times New Roman"
color="#FFFFCC"><big><em><big>T.S.McHugh's</big></em></big></font><font
face="Verdana"><small><small>

The new site is not new. It's been up since October.

In Yahoo, the new site doesn't show up on any of the 4 result pages.
Ditto for Lycos, HotBot, and Webcrawler.

I'm afraid better better markup doesn't necessarily lead to better
search results. What should get good results[1] is text content that can
be indexed and inbound links.

[1]I say "should" because even that hasn't helped in my case. Google
reports a handful of inbound links for the new site, while, for the old
site, it reports none. And that's been the case for several weeks.

 

[Mark Tranchant]

That has certainly not been my experience. I did a new site for a
restaurant, using valid html 4.01 strict. It shows up 4th in Google for
"TS McHugh's" at the moment (it's been bouncing around a lot lately).
The old site is # 1 at the moment. It has dreadful markup like the
following for its header:

<snip>

....as a counter-example, my relatively new page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/notes/multiviews

comes up second behind apache.org in a global Google search for
"multiviews", top for "php multiviews" and top on a UK search for
"multiviews". The page is only 9 days old.

So there's certainly no *disadvantage* to using decent markup, and there
seems to be no substitute for text content.

 

[Brian]

<snip>

...as a counter-example, my relatively new page:
http://tranchant.plus.com/notes/multiviews

comes up second behind apache.org in a global Google search for
"multiviews", top for "php multiviews" and top on a UK search for
"multiviews". The page is only 9 days old.

! That's impressive. What the heck is your secret?

So there's certainly no *disadvantage* to using decent markup,

Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply that. Only that decent markup
doesn't guarantee you anything on Google et. al.

 

[Mark Tranchant]

! That's impressive. What the heck is your secret?

I admit, I was surprised too. I probably got lucky with the timing of
publication coinciding with a Google index.

I guess the advantage my page has over your restaurant page is a lot more
relevant indexable content, as the subject is inherently deeper. However,
there's more content out there on similar subjects, so I have to admit I
don't really know.

I also get top slot for the highly competitive "chord tutorial" search.
Again, I'm not sure why. Maybe that $10,000 gift to Google helped...?

On the other hand, I can't get billericaybaptist.net to the top in a search
for "billericay church", despite all my attempts.

 

[Eric Jarvis]

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

they ARE guidelines for web design...the reason for using them is that if
you start by building to the standard and then applying tweaks and work
arounds to deal with known browser bugs you can create effective future-
proof html quicker than you can by starting off by dealing with the
browser bugs first

large companies aren't always concerned with working as efficiently as
possible...and often with very large sites it simply isn't worth fixing
mark up errors that are all over the site...above all, most of the early
sites built by large corporations were farmed out to their regular graphic
design contractors or departments and hence weren't built by people with
any significant web design experience

 

[Eric Jarvis]

<snip>

...as a counter-example, my relatively new page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/notes/multiviews

comes up second behind apache.org in a global Google search for
"multiviews", top for "php multiviews" and top on a UK search for
"multiviews". The page is only 9 days old.

So there's certainly no *disadvantage* to using decent markup, and there
seems to be no substitute for text content.

I get the weirdest search terms finding my personal site...having had a
look around to see why, it seems to be that a fairly pared down css layout
site will do pretty well for anything that's in the content...basically, I
assume, because it has a better signal to noise ratio

in my last long term job we went from the fourth page of Google for a
single word 3 million results search term to eleventh (and briefly tenth)
in the space of a couple of months when I shifted the entire site to a css
layout

however, other factors are even more important, such as having a keyword
in the domain name, good page titles, good link structure, and plenty of
inbound links with keywords in the link text...you need them all to rank
well and the last of them takes time

 

[Eric Jarvis]

I also get top slot for the highly competitive "chord tutorial" search.
Again, I'm not sure why. Maybe that $10,000 gift to Google helped...?

on that one it's probably good content doing the trick

which reminded me to shift it from my bookmarks on to my music page

thanks

 

[The Doormouse]

I code for standards in general because it is easy to do so and
reliable.

The Doormouse

 

[Mark Tranchant]

on that one it's probably good content doing the trick

which reminded me to shift it from my bookmarks on to my music page

Eric,

As your email isn't working (full mailbox), and this is nearly topical,
please update the link on http://www.ericjarvis.co.uk/web.html to my
"exceedingly fine tutorials" (one of which I *must* get around to
finishing) to:

http://tranchant.plus.com/web/html-start

Thanks!

 

[Brian]

On the other hand, I can't get billericaybaptist.net to the top in a
search for "billericay church", despite all my attempts.

Ah. Well, in the misery-loves-company department, I'm glad it's not just
me. You'd think I could get www.tsmchughs.com to come up first in a
search for t.s. mchugh's, but no!

Interesting side bar: had I registered tsmchugh.com (no s at the end of
the 2nd level domain name), I think I'd have done better, because a
search for t.s. mchugh's = t.s. mchugh, and the domain would match up.
At least, that's how I interpret Google's highlighting of search terms.

More tidbits: I did have the new site above the old one at one point. A
couple of months ago, the old site finally dropped from 1 to 6 or 7, and
the new one went to 2 or 3. I thought I finally had at least that much
done. Then, I made a change to the site template. I moved the logo,
whose alt text is "T.S. McHugh's," to make the layout easier a bit more
robust. It went from near the top of <body> down to the navigation,
which is the last thing on the page. It wasn't long after that I
rechecked Google, and ruefully saw the old site back at 1, and the new
one on the 2nd page. (This change prompted me to start a thread in
ciwa.site-design that some of you may have seen.)

 

[Whitecrest]

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

The problem with standards on something as diverse as the web is I might
not like your choice of standards, and you might not like mine.

 

[Whitecrest]

In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to better
results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are machines, have
no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look for logical, valid
markup.

But keep in mind MANY sites are more concerned with appearance and
presentation, because THAT is what drives people to their site, not
search results. A simple search for "sparkling cola beverage" in google
does not have a link to any of the leading brands of cola beverages in
the first 7 pages. Why? Because they don't care about search engine
results. People go to the Coke site because they already know the url,
they don't have to search for it.