Is W3c validation woth the money?

[Travis Newbury]

Well written HTML and CSS are done by people who are well versed in
writing the two. The majority of the stuff on the web is done by people
with a bare knowledge of DW or other graphic page generators.

I disagree (if you are commenting on commercial sites) I think the
overwhelming majority of professional web developers have the knowledge
and completely understand validation issues, but choose to (or are
forced to) ignore them to please marketing types.

Which may or may not be wrong, but that is a totally different argument.

 

[Leonard Blaisdell]

I disagree (if you are commenting on commercial sites)

I am.

I think the
overwhelming majority of professional web developers have the knowledge
and completely understand validation issues, but choose to (or are
forced to) ignore them to please marketing types.

Style over substance? Perhaps, but I think that substance could be well
argued over marketing style by a competent web professional.

Which may or may not be wrong, but that is a totally different argument.

I think it's the difference between a good argument and a better one.
I'm not saying that marketing is defeated by the argument. That would be
self defeating to the company. I'm saying that marketing shouldn't be
given the last word on web design. Usability should. It benefits
marketing immensely, after all. It should be easy to sell.
To get back to the OP, validation is a powerful tool in getting there.

leo

 

[Adrienne]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Travis Newbury

You should evaluate them on the ability to get the job done the way you
need it to be done. If every site they have ever worked on validates
or not is completely irrelevant. Can they make the site that you need
them to make? If so, then they are a candidate for the position.

I have to disagree with you there. You can buy a brand new car, but it
turns out to be a lemon because no one looked under the hood. Same thing
with a site. The site may look great, but the underlying markup, and/or
server side coding could be a mess. Making changes to it in the future
could be costly in terms of time and money.

Trust me, I know. Nothing like nested tables and nested includes with no
commenting.

 

[neredbojias]

Without quill or qualm, simon quothed:

All I was doing was ask a few questions in the hope to have a mature
conversation about validation(s).

Well, there's standards and there's standards. There's the standard kind
of standards such as the w3c standards and then there's the not-so-
standard standards which came into standard usage in the more or less
standard way. The w3c is "The Standard" so to speak, but some of "The
Standard"'s standards aren't as standard as many of the more standard
though officially-unstandarized standards standardly purveyed by
Microsoft and other standard browser makers. Nevertheless, standard
wisdom dictates employing the standardized standards over the
unstandarized standards because a standarized standard is not
standardedly considered the equal of an unstandardized standard except in
a non-standard situation.

 

[Els]

Without quill or qualm, simon quothed:


Well, there's standards and there's standards. There's the standard kind
of standards such as the w3c standards and then there's the not-so-
standard standards which came into standard usage in the more or less
standard way. The w3c is "The Standard" so to speak, but some of "The
Standard"'s standards aren't as standard as many of the more standard
though officially-unstandarized standards standardly purveyed by
Microsoft and other standard browser makers. Nevertheless, standard
wisdom dictates employing the standardized standards over the
unstandarized standards because a standarized standard is not
standardedly considered the equal of an unstandardized standard except in
a non-standard situation.

Can I quote you on that?
(I'll correct the one typo ;-) )

 

[Andy Dingley]

I am not sure I follow,

Web design is frequently a team effort. We already have to deal with
people of limited graphical ability, either through talent or through
disability. If you have someone with application-relevant experience and
good graphic abilities, then it's not too much trouble to have them work
on the earlier stages of the code, whilst another team player handles
validity.

Read Brooks' "Mythical Man Month" and his concept of the "language
lawyer" in a software team.

 

[Andy Dingley]

Style over substance? Perhaps, but I think that substance could be well
argued over marketing style by a competent web professional.

I very much doubt it. In several years of working on web development,
with either large or small projects, I don't think I've ever seen this
happen successfully.

Much of this is because of timing. Hype comes before implementation, and
once hyped, it's hard to reverse or change any decision. You may also
have the usual sub-contractor issue: the main contractor is always
right, not the subbie - even though the subbie was asked specifically
because of their knowledge.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Well, there's standards and there's standards.

Surely. One man's standard is another man's kludge.

There's the
standard kind of standards such as the w3c standards

Nope, they never saw a standard, really. Not even an Internet standard.
This becomes obvious if you read some W3C recommendations _and_ some
standards issued by ISO, IEC, CEN, or other standards bodies.
Even the ISO HTML standard, itself an exercise in worse than futility,
is much more rigorous than the W3C recommendation it builds upon.

A standards body would hardly tolerate a situation like the one we have
in the CSS field: the official recommendation is CSS 2.0, but the W3C
itself does not even mention it on its CSS pages and instead
effectively propagates the CSS 2.1 draft as standard, although it
itself says that it is subject to change without notice and that it is
inappropriate to cite it as other than work in progress. The "Errata"
practice of W3C (making some fuzzy statements that range from typo
corrections to obscure notes on something being wrong, and declaring
this as official "Errata" to a specification) would be unimaginable in
real standardization.

 

[Travis Newbury]

Style over substance? Perhaps, but I think that substance could be well
argued over marketing style by a competent web professional.

Sometime a developer that does know better hasn't got the choice. Not
everyone can just say "Well, I will stick to my morals even if my kids
starve."

I'm saying that marketing shouldn't be
given the last word on web design. Usability should.

Usibility and validating are two different issues. But I give
marketing a little more credit. They study what makes people buy. And
(disagreably) the web to many is nothing more than an extension of TV
or printed media.

If a non validating site (even one that is unusable to some) brings in
greater profits than a validating one, which is better for the company?

I look at it like this... (boring analogy coming) We all know that
smoking is bad for you. So I own a bar. And I think I will save my
customers from the hell of second hand smoke by banning smoking in the
bar.

Now we all know that is the right thing to do. But it is only better
for the bar (i.e. my income, and the income of my employees) if the non
smoking customers make up the money lost by the smokers I just kicked
out. If I can make just as much money, then it was a good decision.
If not, then I need to invite the smokers back.

 

[Blinky the Shark]

neredbojias wrote:

Well, there's standards and there's standards. There's the standard kind
of standards such as the w3c standards and then there's the not-so-
standard standards which came into standard usage in the more or less
standard way. The w3c is "The Standard" so to speak, but some of "The
Standard"'s standards aren't as standard as many of the more standard
though officially-unstandarized standards standardly purveyed by
Microsoft and other standard browser makers. Nevertheless, standard
wisdom dictates employing the standardized standards over the
unstandarized standards because a standarized standard is not
standardedly considered the equal of an unstandardized standard except in
a non-standard situation.

Can I quote you on that?
(I'll correct the one typo ;-) )

There are multiple instances of: [un]standarized instead of
[un]standardized.

Because of the nature of the post, I'll give him the creation of
"standardedly", but don't know if that was *really* done for humor value
or was actually just a misspelling of "standardly".

A-

 

[Els]

Can I quote you on that?
(I'll correct the one typo ;-) )

There are multiple instances of: [un]standarized instead of
[un]standardized.

That's the one I meant, yes

Because of the nature of the post, I'll give him the creation of
"standardedly", but don't know if that was *really* done for humor value
or was actually just a misspelling of "standardly".

Doesn't matter much, as standardly isn't an existing word either. By
Cambridge Dictionary standards.

btw - what happened to your quote machine? In your post neredbojias'
standards lost the quote characters (I put them back in by hand)...

 

[Blinky the Shark]

neredbojias wrote:
Without quill or qualm, simon quothed:
All I was doing was ask a few questions in the hope to have a mature
conversation about validation(s).
Well, there's standards and there's standards. There's the standard kind
of standards such as the w3c standards and then there's the not-so-
standard standards which came into standard usage in the more or less
standard way. The w3c is "The Standard" so to speak, but some of "The
Standard"'s standards aren't as standard as many of the more standard
though officially-unstandarized standards standardly purveyed by
Microsoft and other standard browser makers. Nevertheless, standard
wisdom dictates employing the standardized standards over the
unstandarized standards because a standarized standard is not
standardedly considered the equal of an unstandardized standard except in
a non-standard situation.
Can I quote you on that?
(I'll correct the one typo ;-) )

There are multiple instances of: [un]standarized instead of
[un]standardized.

That's the one I meant, yes

Doesn't matter much, as standardly isn't an existing word either. By
Cambridge Dictionary standards.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

standard

Function: adjective

<definitions snipped>

- stan·dard·ly adverb
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth
Edition. 2000.

standard

<definitions snipped>

OTHER FORMS: standard·ly -ADVERB
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

btw - what happened to your quote machine? In your post neredbojias'
standards lost the quote characters (I put them back in by hand)...

Oops! My bad. I removed them so that my spell checker would look at
his paragraph (it doesn't check old text, of course), and I forgot to
replace them before posting.

 

[Mitja]

You should evaluate them on the ability to get the job done the way you
need it to be done. If every site they have ever worked on validates or
not is completely irrelevant. Can they make the site that you need them
to make? If so, then they are a candidate for the position.

You, as an imaginative customer, are not just hiring someone to bring your
sketches and vague ideas to life. A web developer should not be only a
hired muscle, he should know his job.
So if you want a really fancy page and he can make it - yes, that is a
qualification, but not all the qualification he needs. For example, you
want your page to look fine on most browsers. You don't want your page to
take hours to load due to excessive use of images. You want the code of
your page to look presentable so someone else can take the maintenance
over if need be. Etc etc.
You want those things, but you want them implicitly, ie it is only natural
that you will be angry if it turns in a year's time that those things were
not taken care of, while at the same time you are not expected to know
about them and explicitly require the developer to tace care of them.
It is the web developer who should identify these potential problems in
advance, warn you about them, and do his job so that these issues are
resolved as best they can be.
There is no way to know that a developer knows his bussiness, but having a
site that validates suggests it. It is far from a definite indicator,
however - I agree on that.

 

[Els]

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

- stan·dard·ly adverb
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Thanks
Have bookmarked Merriam-Webster alongside Cambridge now

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Blinky the Shark wrote:

Thanks
Have bookmarked Merriam-Webster alongside Cambridge now

You might want to bookmark the American Heritage Dictionary,
too (also quoted above, before snippage), here:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/

It pronounces entries via small wav files, if you click the little
speaker icon. (Root word entries only, not derivations or compound
words.)

 

[Els]

You might want to bookmark the American Heritage Dictionary,
too (also quoted above, before snippage), here:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/

It pronounces entries via small wav files, if you click the little
speaker icon. (Root word entries only, not derivations or compound
words.)

And not with all words either.
I'm not sure I like that dictionary really - I had to block one popup,
deny one cookie, and block 4 ads before I could submit a query. I
typed in 'standard', and was presented with a long list of standard
things, so I just clicked one at random: 'standard deviation'. Led to
a page without a sound icon. "next" was 'standard English', which gave
a sound icon for 'standard'. I clicked it... American pronounciation!
<g>

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Blinky the Shark wrote:

And not with all words either.
I'm not sure I like that dictionary really - I had to block one popup,
deny one cookie, and block 4 ads before I could submit a query. I

Wow. I get none of that. What're you using, IE?

typed in 'standard', and was presented with a long list of standard
things, so I just clicked one at random: 'standard deviation'. Led to
a page without a sound icon. "next" was 'standard English', which gave
a sound icon for 'standard'. I clicked it... American pronounciation!

You expected, perhaps, an Australian pronunciation?

 

[Els]

Wow. I get none of that. What're you using, IE?

No, Firefox. Cookies set to always ask, so I can deny them, and popups
not blocked, cause I usually don't visit any sites that invoke them.
As for the ads, of course I didn't /have/ to block those, but I hate
blinking stuff in the corner of my eye when I read, so I had to block
one, and then thought I'd better block all - cleaned up the page
nicely ;-)

You expected, perhaps, an Australian pronunciation?

No, proper English, you know, like they use in England
(only until I read 'American Heritage' though)

 

[Travis Newbury]

I have to disagree with you there. You can buy a brand new car, but it
turns out to be a lemon because no one looked under the hood. Same thing
with a site. The site may look great, but the underlying markup, and/or
server side coding could be a mess. Making changes to it in the future
could be costly in terms of time and money.

That's not what I said. I said if the developer can mke the site that
you need made. In this case if they feel that validation is important,
then the developer should know how to do that. In other words, don't
limit your evaluation to a single topic. Look at the site you think you
need, and evaluate based on what you need.

 

[Blinky the Shark]

No, Firefox. Cookies set to always ask, so I can deny them, and popups
not blocked, cause I usually don't visit any sites that invoke them.
As for the ads, of course I didn't /have/ to block those, but I hate
blinking stuff in the corner of my eye when I read, so I had to block
one, and then thought I'd better block all - cleaned up the page
nicely ;-)

If you're using AdBlock extension, are you aware that there are
pre-built filter sets for them? (Yes, you can still add to those large
lists.)

No, proper English, you know, like they use in England
(only until I read 'American Heritage' though)

Okay, so our heritage is a bit shorter than their heritage.