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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[RobG]

David Dorward wrote:

laurence wrote:

I agree you've got a point. I've got a whopping great html/javascript
application which perfectly validates on the W3C Markup Validator, but
which the 'trumpeting themselves as W3C conforming' Mozilla gang of
browsers will not render remotely correctly.

[...]
My chequer tolled me sew.

Who said techno-nerds don't have a sense of humour? :-)

--
Rob