Do you abide by Web Standards?

The call for Web standards is at a fever pitch. Designers and developers enjoy easier development and maintenance while web users enjoy greater browser compatibility, faster downloads and better accessibility in general. But it's challenging to get everyone on board at the same time. 

For whatever reason, some web developers and web designers have a resistance towards adhering to web standards. There are different arguments against it - from adding unnecessarily complexity to buggy tools which make work a drag. But the benefits are clear and well documented. Here are a few of my arguments for adhering to Web standards

- Using more semantic and structured HTML makes it easier and quicker to understand code created by somebody else.

- When defined standards and valid code are used, designers future-proof their work and reduce the risk future web browsers will not be able to understand the code they developed.

Share your thoughts with other WM readers. Do you abide by Web standards or do you "go it alone?"

Why is it Microsoft gets to write their own standards? IE 8 just killed my website that's beautiful in Firefox and all other versions of IE!

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I have been working with web standards for a long time. I started using CSS in Netscape 4 beta and doing table-less design since 2001. I started The Nemesis Project for CSS and XHTML in 2002; it was lost few years later during a server move. I would of started it back up but free server space without ads and decent speed is almost impossible to find.

Once one learns the basics web standards are easy to implement.

Over time I have found 4 reasons why web standards are not implemented.

1. Corporate suits: “if it isn’t broken don’t fix it”. Handicapped on the web, too few to bother with.

2. Schools: churn out people to work in the corporate world where Dreamweaver and

Tables rule.

3. Bottom Feeders: Graphic Artist that get out of school and find out they are a dime a dozen. They buy a copy of Dreamwever and suddenly they are web designers. I have talked with many of them and they won’t change. They make a living doing mom and pop sites and the learning curve for CSS and table-less design is too steep.

4. Steep learning curve.

What idiot put this in my post? Netscape was released before IE4

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I believe my last non-standard site was The Cigar Wrapper in 2002. It is loaded with tables and may even have a few, dare i say, <font> tags ... blech. I have been meaning to redesign the site; however, I have taken on other interests distracting me from doing so, i.e. learning PHP5, search engine marketing for clients, creating a typeface in my father's handwriting as a gift (which is much more time consuming than I originally expected to do it accurately.) Maybe one day soon ... 

With my recent and future work, i make the best attempt to use validated code (either relational or strict DTD) and make the best effort to use semantic markup and separate all presentation in the CSS.

At least my personal/business site is what I believe follows the latest W3 recommendations for standards and compliance.

I have joined several Web Standards groups on LinkedIn and follow a few others at the W3, so I am definitely for standards and making my best efforts to stay on the progressive path.

Thank you for the question,

Wynne

I've been designing websites for a few years now and started out with tables.  CSS makes things so much cleaner for the code side of things, but I still fall back to what's comfortable and use tables.  I try to implement more CSS each time I do a site since I know the more I use it, the better I'll get at it.   I use plenty of resources for CSS but what are your favorites?

Thanks,
www.BarnettWebsites.com

Nope, I've been 'winging' it for fifteen years with nary a complaint.

All those CSS zealots who swear the only way to create a website is through css, are just ridiculous. Yeah css is great, and it's good to use it if you can, but I find myself doing more testing and repairing if a site is pure css. Tables are just easy. I think it's good to use a hybrid of the two