Are Standards Pointless?

Sometimes i think that most Web Developers make up information as they go along. After the months of hearing people praise Web Standards, and saying that everyone should code their site to W3C Standards, now you get people saying that validation causes more problems than it does good, so for the record, how are W3C standards useful to a working web page? and does using standards make your page better or worse? I recently upgraded my Portfolio to XHTML Strict and CSS, both validate perfectly, but small problems with the way things align. I find it kinda annoying that i took the time to learn standards cause of all the hype that standards were gonna pave the way, now people say that coding to standards is pointless.

I'm not much of a coder or anything but when your code validates, doesn't that make it display properly in browsers?

A validated HTML shows professionality, the page will display the same in all browsers.
Just because a page validates doesn't make it display the page properly, just because a page validates doesn't mean it resizes well for example. Surely it can validate yet show up buggy, it all depends on your code.
If you're selling your services as a coder, you surely should know how to validate code in my opinion.

i seam to think in this order

1. get the design looking right sliced up
2. get the design working in all browsers
3. validate the html

so getting the valid html seams to be an afterthought really, it doesnt take long to sort things out but stiff would be nice if dreamweaver would do it automatically :P

It's very important to have a standard compliant website. XHTML code is faster loading, it's easier for search engines to read, it's cleaner allowing for quick editing and was designed to allow for future compatibility. Using XHTML and CSS to structure and define the appearance of your website will ensure universal compatibility with different web browsers which in turn means a better image for your company and a wider returning audience. If done properly, having a standard compliant website can maximize the traffic your website generates and even the amount of profit you turn over.

Believe it or not, you can even cut back on your hosting costs! By using CSS for presentation, you are able to significantly reduce the page weight of your document. This aspect alone could translate into a significant amount of savings on bandwidth for a larger site. Even smaller sites will reap the benefits, as pages will load much faster for users, as once the CSS file has been cached, they will simply need to load your images and XHTML, which will be less weighty, once removed of the presentational markup. TheSitePeople.com was coded in valid XHTML and CSS (however we veered and used tables instead of divs) but has since been altered so many times that we no longer validate as a standard compliant website. It's very important to code by w3 standards, it ensures accessibility and extensibility.

-Mason

Thanks for the explanation you guys. I just learned something new today

Some very valid points, but those which say that having valid code makes your page perfectly viewable in all browsers is wrong. As far as i see things, it works in two ways

1) You use completely valid code, but your site may not work in all browsers as intended. Now you must address this probem by finding the problem, learning about how browsers render certain things, and applying more/different code to sort the problem out.

2) Leave code invalid, but use code which you find works in all browsers.

I've spent ages working on my Portfolio, got a basic design made in Photoshop, extracted external and internal background, default images, and a banner. Next was coding it, which is where it has gone all pear shaped. Check it out http://www.michaelbull.net/home.php (Temporary page for now, no links work, and still parts of the design are missing). In Firefox, everything appears perfectly, but when i open it up in IE, the box appears more to the left, even though most people pointed that validation would make your pages appear the same in all browsers. Now i've gotta find a way of fixing all this.

If you're proficient in CSS and XHTML you can find ways around the way different browsers digest the code. You can write small CSS hacks or code a small alternative style sheet and import it with your global style sheet. Having your website standard compliant is definitely the way to go. Trust me.

Originally Posted by stoavio If you're proficient in CSS and XHTML you can find ways around the way different browsers digest the code. You can write small CSS hacks or code a small alternative style sheet and import it with your global style sheet. Having your website standard compliant is definitely the way to go. Trust me.

How do i learn about these different flaws in Browsers? I've looked over on loads of sites, but i don't seem to know any complete library on Cross-Platform coding.

The whole idea of creating a bunch of standards is/was in order to allow browser creators (and web developers) to come together in working with the code. With a set of standards to follow, we know how a browser should act with a certain piece of (lets say) HTML or CSS. We know that a <strong> tag will (generally) display emboldened text - there is nothing forcing browsers to interpret the tag this way; there is nothing forcing the browser to even recognise this tag. It is simply following the standards.

So, ideally and in a perfect world, standards mean that a single set of (validated) lines of code should and would display identically in any browser. Unfortunately, few browsers actually follow the various standards to the letter (*coughIEcough*) but this is happening, just give it time.

Now, my single most favourite advantage of using XHTML over HTML 4.0 (or my own random version of HTML) is that of machine-readability. If the document is well-formed XML there is nothing stopping another computer/website/script from reading my document and understanding it as intended. A script knows how to read the 'title' element of a certain page because the standards say that it should be in the position 'html->head->title' and there should only be one of them. Obviously that is just a simple example but allowing your HTML to be proper XHTML really does open up the doors to machine-readability. I've mentioned machine-readability (whoa, will he ever shut up about it) but well-formed XHTML can also be much much more human-readable! You know how hard it is to debug a table-based layout with nested tables, divs, spans, images and a million-and-one attributes... well structured XHTML is much, much clearer to understand.

A particular annoyance of mine at the moment is that people are so very hung up on the notion of validation. Yes, that is one part of the process which should not be overlooked but what is the point of valid code if it does not work? For example, it is perfectly valid to have the following: but doesn't it just make so much more sense to use a HTML list - after all, it is a list of hyperlinks! (ignore the href's just an example of future-proofing.) I'll be quiet now.

- Salathe