Opinion: Do web standards matter?

[Uncle Pirate]

What I miss in your explanation to me, is the passion. The reasoning
about Transitional is what they can read or figger out themselves. The
passion tells them about reaching all people on earth that are somehow
connected to the internet. No matter what machine, what browser, what
ever means, if someone is connected, you can reach them.

Very difficult to get the passion across in a text format like this.
And when I teach on-line, as I often do, it is difficult to get that
across as well, this fall will be in the classroom and the students will
experience my passion. I take pride in doing the best job I can do, no
matter what that job may be.

Far from perfect, my pride (soon to get a facelift, I hope) is
http://alamo.nmsu.edu/, much of my 40 hour a week job. I use the
difference between editing one of the older table layout pages with the
newer 4.01 strict with CSS pages as an example of ease of updating.

I am really looking forward to the promised development of a new layout.
Others, better at design will come up with the layout/design, while
I'll be involved telling them what is practical/feasible and will
eventually implement the facelift. Exciting times.

--
Stan McCann "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/pirate.html
Webmaster/Computer Center Manager, NMSU at Alamogordo
Coordinator, Tularosa Basin Chapter, ABATE of NM; AMA#758681; COBB
'94 1500 Vulcan (now wrecked) http://motorcyclefun.org/Dcp_2068c.jpg
A zest for living must include a willingness to die. - R.A. Heinlein

 

[Lachlan Hunt]

I too try and follow the standards but I don't take much stock in the W3C
validator. Sometimes it will say stupid stuff like " a space is not allowed
here".

It is the validator's job to report *all* syntax errors, not to decide
"Oh, I think this is a minor error, I won't bother the author by
mentioning it this time".

I mean is that really gunna make a difference.

It may not make a difference to you, as someone reading the source code;
but, to an SGML parser, a space (or any other character) where one is
not expected is a syntax error, from which a parser would have to employ
possibly undefined error handling technniques to recover. In the case
of XML, such errors will be fatal, so yes, it really does make a difference.

 

[Lachlan Hunt]

Out of microsoft.com, google.com, amazon.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and
mozilla.org, only Mozilla's site came back "Valid HTML".

At least the microsoft.com home page is getting very close (only 3
errors: 1 missing alt attr, proprietary nowrap attribute and using
checked="true" instead of checked="checked").

So if all these places, with their teams of web developers don't seem to
care, should the rest of us small time web devs concern ourselves with
standards? I do, but sometimes I feel it's a wasted effort. What do yinz
think?

This sounds like an attempt to justify the presence of errors simply
because they're made by many other organisations, whereas this really
should be a case of learning from other's mistakes, so you don't make
them yourself.

Many people attempt to ignore standards, conformance and validation by
saying that it doesn't matter and/or it doesn't affect anything.
However, the simple fact is that there is little chance we will ever see
a main-stream browser that conforms 100% to HTML 4 simply because doing
so would "break" many more existing (broken) pages than it would
benefit. i.e. Because there are so many poorly coded web pages out there
that *don't* conform to the standards, we will never see a main-stream
browser that does; thus non-conformance has had, and *does have*, a very
detrimental effect.

The SHORTTAG NET features of SGML are one example I can think of, which
will not be implemented for this reason, at least not in Mozilla any
time soon [1].

P.S. Slashdot returned a 403 Forbidden to the validator but when I saved
the homepage locally, it failed too.

That's very strange, at first I thought that might be related to bug
1069 [2] (some hosts reject UAs with libwww-perl in their User-Agent
string), although that didn't work in this case, so slashdot must be
rejecting based on some other factor. However, I was able to validate
with the latest development version of the validator which reported
invalid HTML 3.2 with 130 errors.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94284
[2] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1069

 

[Toby Inkster]

That's very strange, at first I thought that might be related to bug
1069 [2] (some hosts reject UAs with libwww-perl in their User-Agent
string), although that didn't work in this case, so slashdot must be
rejecting based on some other factor.

Slashdot blocks the W3C validator by IP address. They've been doing it for
quite some time. (Embarrassed about poor quality code.)

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

That's very strange, at first I thought that might be related to
bug 1069 [2] (some hosts reject UAs with libwww-perl in their
User-Agent string), although that didn't work in this case, so
slashdot must be rejecting based on some other factor.

Slashdot blocks the W3C validator by IP address. They've been doing
it for quite some time. (Embarrassed about poor quality code.)

Heh, they forgot this one. <g>
<URL:http://www.htmlhelp.com/cgi-bin/validate.cgi?url=http://slashdot.org/&warnings=yes>

"The maximum number of errors was reached. Further errors in the
document have not been reported."

In all fairness to Slashdot, the "maximum number of errors" was 50.

 

[Sugapablo]

Quick funny follow-up should you care to look at it. Being that it's
political in nature, I'll simply provide the link:

http://www.subuse.net/article.php?g=14&id=4

 

[me]

Just out of curiosity, while checking on a site I was working on, I
decided to throw a couple of the web's most popular URLs into the W3C
Markup Validator.

Out of microsoft.com, google.com, amazon.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, and
mozilla.org, only Mozilla's site came back "Valid HTML".

So if all these places, with their teams of web developers don't seem to
care, should the rest of us small time web devs concern ourselves with
standards? I do, but sometimes I feel it's a wasted effort. What do yinz
think?

P.S. Slashdot returned a 403 Forbidden to the validator but when I saved
the homepage locally, it failed too.
[

]

I suspect you had some idea of the response you'd get before you asked this
question (considering the audience) but I see no harm in seeking validation
from those who share a similar point of view.

I have no objection to standards provided that they do not make unusable
anything that existed before the standard. I see no obstacle to providing
backward comparability for legacy code in the current standard (someone
please correct me if I'm wrong).

As an aside I do not validate my code. I might implement validation if I
perceived that there was sufficient benefit for me to warrant doing so.

Philosophically speaking I oppose anything that impedes a website author's
freedom of expression. If authors cannot expresses themselves freely then
the web serves no purpose.
Signed,
me

 

[kchayka]

Philosophically speaking I oppose anything that impedes a website author's
freedom of expression. If authors cannot expresses themselves freely then
the web serves no purpose.

It's all about you?

Whether you want to admit it or not, it's really all about your
visitors. Without them, the web serves no purpose.

 

[c.thornquist]

I suspect you had some idea of the response you'd get before you asked
this
question (considering the audience) but I see no harm in seeking
validation
from those who share a similar point of view.

I have no objection to standards provided that they do not make unusable
anything that existed before the standard. I see no obstacle to providing
backward comparability for legacy code in the current standard (someone
please correct me if I'm wrong).

As an aside I do not validate my code. I might implement validation if I
perceived that there was sufficient benefit for me to warrant doing so.

Philosophically speaking I oppose anything that impedes a website author's
freedom of expression. If authors cannot expresses themselves freely then
the web serves no purpose.
Signed,
me

I tend to agree. I see the need for some very basic standards for validation
(esp. alt. tags), but the dogmatic attitudes present in newsgroups & on some
developers sites re validation and/or tables versus CSS makes it sound
almost cult-like

Carla

 

[me]

It's all about you?

Whether you want to admit it or not, it's really all about your
visitors. Without them, the web serves no purpose.

What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Which comes first, a book or it's
readers? Which comes first, the website or the visitors?
Signed,
me

 

[Arne]

Philosophically speaking I oppose anything that impedes a website author's
freedom of expression. If authors cannot expresses themselves freely then
the web serves no purpose.

In what way do following standards prevent your freedom of expression?
So far I have not experience that. Of cause I have sometimes find
other ways to do what I want to do, if I want a page to be valid. But
there is always that other (valid) way to do it.

--
/Arne

Proud User of Mozilla Suite. Get your free copy here:
*English* http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/
*Svenska* http://www.mozilla.se/mozilla.shtml

 

[Greg Schmidt]

The web is (primarily) a visual medium. There is nothing that you can
express visually that cannot be done in such a way that it validates.
Doing so gives you (well, apparently not you, but it gives me) more
confidence that what I am "expressing" will work well, across current
and future browsers. Additionally, well-structured valid code has a
better chance of being translated reasonably well into non-visual media,
by an aural or Braille browser for example.

Validation is not the be-all and end-all. It is a useful tool. If your
page generates a few warnings that you fully understand the
ramifications of, then you can make a decision as to whether or not to
fix them. I recall reading an interview with the guy in charge of the
ESPN CSS redesign. He mentioned that there were a couple of "strict"
rules that they decided to break, because doing so gave them a large
benefit for most of their users, at a cost of a small penalty for a
small percentage. They weighed the two possibilities and decided that,
for the time being, it was better to be wrong. However, their decision
is a far cry from validation newbies deciding that "I don't really need
ALT attributes on any of my images."

What comes first, the chicken or the egg? Which comes first, a book or it's
readers? Which comes first, the website or the visitors?

Millions upon millions of web sites have come and gone. Many of them
failed because they didn't reach their intended audience. Of course,
the site must be there before visitors will show up, but if the visitors
don't materialize, then the site will wither and die. Looked at another
way, without visitors, it's not a web site, it's your own private
writings, which may as well be in a journal under your pillow.

 

[Joel Shepherd]

[snip]

Wow. A seven-sentence response, two-thirds of which started with "I",
and six of which featured "I" as the primary subject. It really *must*
be all about you.

If authors cannot expresses themselves freely then
the web serves no purpose.

Folks who can't express themselves freely on the Web probably face
_much_ bigger challenges than the meanies at the W3C. Poverty,
illiteracy and tyranny suppress far more expression than some W3C
committee suggesting that tables not be used for layout, or declining to
include BLINK in some standard.

Get some perspective before spouting off BS about freedom of expression.

 

[Alan J. Flavell]

The web is (primarily) a visual medium.

Oh no, the whole point of the web was to communicate content. We
already had plenty of visual-specific media, before the WWW was
invented; if one of those had been enough, TimBL would have had no
need to invent the WWW.

I don't dispute that most readers browse the web visually. But that
doesn't devalue the web into a visual-only medium.

 

[c.thornquist]

The web is (primarily) a visual medium. There is nothing that you can
express visually that cannot be done in such a way that it validates.

Millions upon millions of web sites have come and gone. Many of them
failed because they didn't reach their intended audience. Of course,
the site must be there before visitors will show up, but if the visitors
don't materialize, then the site will wither and die. Looked at another
way, without visitors, it's not a web site, it's your own private
writings, which may as well be in a journal under your pillow.

And millions are continually coming online; most being built by the average
Joe who wants to share family photos or express an opinion or seek others
with similar interests in their hobby.

When I have time, I will return to the sites I built 5 years ago for $200.00
each to support my family, meanwhile I hope the ability to view sites does
not become contingent upon validation.

I'll try to think of analogies in other media & art forms whereby standards
(not related to health & safety) are required to be met, before
publication/viewing by others. That may aid in understanding both sides.

I agree that accessibility is very important.

Carla

 

[me]

[snip]

Wow. A seven-sentence response, two-thirds of which started with "I",
and six of which featured "I" as the primary subject. It really *must*
be all about you.

You are a keen observer, thank you for tallying the number of sentences I
used to express myself. The OP asked for opinions about how I as a website
designer felt about standards, as your astute observations have revealed I
have given my opinions as they applied to my situation so yes in a sense you
are correct, on this one occasion, in this thread and under these specfic
circumstances.

Folks who can't express themselves freely on the Web probably face
_much_ bigger challenges than the meanies at the W3C. Poverty,
illiteracy and tyranny suppress far more expression than some W3C
committee suggesting that tables not be used for layout, or declining to
include BLINK in some standard.

The implications of my words are evidently non-obvious to you, I will
restate them for your benefit in terms I hope you can understand. Standards
are OK as long as they don't cause sites to become unusable. Please let me
know if you're still fuzzy on my meaning.

Get some perspective before spouting off BS about freedom of expression.

I'm sorry if my method of expression offended you but your approval is of no
consequence. If you found my post so lacking in perspective perhaps you
would honor us with your learned opinion, hopefully you have the capacity to
express yourself in a manner that is something other than just insults. Have
a nice day.
Signed,
me

 

[Toby Inkster]

I'll try to think of analogies in other media & art forms whereby
standards (not related to health & safety) are required to be met,
before publication/viewing by others.

Publishing houses generally insist that standards of grammar and spelling
are followed by their authors.

Most newspapers and magazines, as well as insisting on correct grammar and
spelling, have a house style. For example, the Guardian makes its style
guide available online <http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/>.

(Aside: As an experienced journalist of 50 years' standing once said:
"There are only three words which need a capital letter: God, The Queen,
and the Editor." He was exaggerating, but you get the picture.)

 

[me]

In what way do following standards prevent your freedom of expression?
So far I have not experience that. Of cause I have sometimes find
other ways to do what I want to do, if I want a page to be valid. But
there is always that other (valid) way to do it.
/Arne

Standards have not as yet impeded my freedom of expression but they might if
browser manufacturers adopt standards that obsolete code in such a way as to
make some sites unusable.
Signed,
me

 

[c.thornquist]

Publishing houses generally insist that standards of grammar and spelling
are followed by their authors.

Most newspapers and magazines, as well as insisting on correct grammar and
spelling, have a house style. For example, the Guardian makes its style
guide available online <http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/>.

(Aside: As an experienced journalist of 50 years' standing once said:
"There are only three words which need a capital letter: God, The Queen,
and the Editor." He was exaggerating, but you get the picture.)

Those are good examples, except there's nothing preventing the printing
presses from operating if those standards aren't met. And there's no
regulatory agency trying to enforce correct grammar by those publishers.
Perhaps there's room for sloppy & correct HTML?

Carla

 

[Travis Newbury]

It's all about you?
Whether you want to admit it or not, it's really all about your
visitors. Without them, the web serves no purpose.

Why? If my site (personal or business) wants to project a specific
look, feel, flavor, what ever, even though I completely understand that
someone else may not like it or be able to see it. What concern is it
to you? Who cares what I do on the web?

I am not advocating using or not using anything, it is purely an
academic question. And speaking of which, wouldn't what I want to do on
the web be covered under free speech? (Citing US laws) I have a right to
express myself (or company) pretty much how ever I want.

Having said that, I must say I believe a smart business makes their site
by at least attempting to follow the rules.