Opinion: Do web standards matter?

[Sugapablo]

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.
--
[ Sugapablo ]
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http://www.subuse.net : text-only, low bandwidth, anonymous web forums

[Toby Inkster]

c.thornquist wrote:

Most of us read a newspaper daily. And books. And look up numbers in
phone books occasionally. We're accustomed to a much smaller font & more
narrow blocks of text. (W3.org's font size looks typical of a childrens
book.) Why should websites be so different?
Each medium has its own limitations.

One limitation of print media is that once something has been printed, it
is impossible to resize the font to make it easier to read. This is a
*weakness* of the medium, but unfortunately it's one that we have to
accept as it's caused by the physical properties of the materials involved.

The Web does not suffer from this weakness, so why try to impose the
weakness artificially?
Newspaper publishers don't provide several versions of the daily paper
to all customers routinely. It would cost too much.
For a while, The Independent and The Times published their papers in both
broadsheet and tabloid formats, but they've stopped doing that more
recently.

Many books are published in large print editions, translations, braille
editions, "talking books", hardback, softback...
Likewise, I'm not paid enough to build multiple versions of the same
website for different resolutions & monitor sizes.

But here's a point -- it is **easier** to build a site that scales to
different browser canvas areas and font sizes than it is to build a fixed
size website.

This is because HTML is naturally flexible -- it is flexible by default.
You have to make an explicit effort to remove this flexibility (e.g.
explicitly defining widths and/or absolute font sizes).

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Travis Newbury]

Toby Inkster wrote:

Don't you think most people keep their browsers open to 100%? I just
asked my teenagers & they said "always" 100%. There's probably research
somewhere about it. As it happens, I did a survey on this 13 months ago, but never published
the results. I would guess they are still roughly valid.

They will probably still be valid for your site. But probably not for mine.
Will add them to my site now and post a link when done.

Thanks, it will be interesting to see the trend.

--
-=tn=-

[Uncle Pirate]

c.thornquist wrote:

The bottom right of all images in the slideshow are missing for me in IE.

There are two possibles you might be talking about.

The image at top right (sometimes animated switching images, sometimes
single image) is placed as a background to an overlaid mostly
transparant image shaping into the state of New Mexico.

The images placed as list-style-image is incorrectly chopping the image
off, they are also the shape of NM so look like the lower right corner
is chopped off too. In this case, I guess it's one of the IE bugs as
it's displayed fine in other browsers.

--
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

[Jim Moe]

c.thornquist wrote:

You are just joshing us, of course. Remote controls for font size? LOL

Oh no, I'm serious. I'm not suggesting remote controls, just saying that
whoever designed & built them realized that people don't want to have to
make adjustments.

You're funny! I like you.
Remote controls were invented because people did not want to walk to
the TV and back to set the volume. Have you looked at a typical remote
control? Zowie! Talk about a lot of adjustments! They make browsers look
simple.

--
jmm dash list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

[Toby Inkster]

Travis Newbury wrote:

Toby Inkster wrote:

Don't you think most people keep their browsers open to 100%? I just
asked my teenagers & they said "always" 100%. There's probably
research somewhere about it.

As it happens, I did a survey on this 13 months ago, but never
published the results. I would guess they are still roughly valid.

They will probably still be valid for your site. But probably not for
mine.

What makes you think I performed the survey on my own site? (I didn't.)

But the results are on my own site. :-)
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/browser-sizes

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Toby Inkster]

c.thornquist wrote:

What if your top header or banner just won't work visually with anything
other than its width, say 650 pixels? Does CSS allow you to to keep that
width throughout the page w/o using tables?

Of course:

BODY { width:650px }

But that's the sort of inflexible design decision I'm arguing *against*.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Toby Inkster wrote:

Travis Newbury wrote:

Toby Inkster wrote:

Don't you think most people keep their browsers open to 100%?
I just asked my teenagers & they said "always" 100%. There's
probably research somewhere about it.

As it happens, I did a survey on this 13 months ago, but never
published the results. I would guess they are still roughly
valid.

They will probably still be valid for your site. But probably
not for mine.

What makes you think I performed the survey on my own site? (I
didn't.)

But the results are on my own site. :-)
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/browser-sizes

Nicely done, Toby. Conclusions are about what I expected to see.

--
-bts
-This space intentionally left blank.

[Toby Inkster]

Jim Moe wrote:

Remote controls were invented because people did not want to walk to
the TV and back to set the volume.

When you're up by the TV, adjusting the volume it seems too loud, when
you're waaaay back over on your couch, it seems too quiet.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact

[Travis Newbury]

Jim Moe wrote:

You're funny! I like you.
Remote controls were invented because people did not want to walk to
the TV and back to set the volume. Have you looked at a typical remote
control? Zowie! Talk about a lot of adjustments! They make browsers look
simple.

I remember my first TV with a remote control. It had 1 buttons on it.
Click it once, the tv turned on. If you kept on clicking the channel
would change up to 13 times, then it would turn the tv off again. The
entire thing was mechanical. It produced a loud "click" which was
picked up by the TV and caused it to mechanically change the tuner.

That's what remotes were when they first came out. Hardly complicated.

--
-=tn=-

[Travis Newbury]

Toby Inkster wrote:

Don't you think most people keep their browsers open to 100%? I just
asked my teenagers & they said "always" 100%. There's probably
research somewhere about it.

As it happens, I did a survey on this 13 months ago, but never
published the results. I would guess they are still roughly valid.

They will probably still be valid for your site. But probably not for
mine.

What makes you think I performed the survey on my own site? (I didn't.)

Well the line "I did a survey on this 13 months ago" was the part that
made me thing that you did the survey. The part "But never published
the results" implies it was for your personal site.

Either way, the results would be invalid for my site anyway

--
-=tn=-