Thankfully, the road of order and uniformity, at least in terms of web standards, is not as abandoned as it once was. I frequently find myself tipping my hat to fellow enthusiasts and supporters as I wander around the quirky plains of the 'intameweb'.
When I first step foot on the path of W3C adherance, I used to despise those fanatics who, it seemed to me, would constantly berate those who didn't drink from the same cup of ideals. Yet, here I am today, sharing their frustration and their despair. They're just like me it seems. They like an easy life. They like night to follow day, and they understand that because we have a clear definition of day and night, we are all better able to plan and execute our lives. If this same order could be applied to the web, things would, if you ask them, be much easier. So why do so many seem to be afraid to embrace W3C standards when building websites?
Personally, I can think of several reasons to embrace standards, but not a single one to ignore them. Yet, millions upon millions of site designers and webmasters do completely ignore them. Some people claim that it's too difficult to work to the W3C standards. Others argue that the standards are too restrictive, or are out of touch with the way that the web is used today. I disagree. Indeed, I am proud to be part of the Immerse CMS team, which is developing a full-blown, AJAX-powered content management system, and is 100% W3C standards compliant, as is the website that advertises and delivers it.
I have to be honest, I can't even recall the last time I created a non-standards website. In fact, I'll go one step further and say that I think it's harder to create a good-looking non-standards compliant website, than it is to create a good-looking standards compliant one.
And yet, despite there being more information about how to meet these standards than you could possibly ever need, and an ever increasing audience for standards compliant websites, many (actually, most) sites come nowhere near meeting the W3C standards. Even major sites, such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems don't even pretend to have an interest in them. Indeed, even the site I am now typing this blog entry on shows to have 49 validation errors on the homepage, as well as layout issues in Internet Exploder 6. (No, that wasn't a typo.) I'd like to say this was quite unique. Alas, it isn't. People just don't seem to care about their site presentation these days. It's as if it's become acceptable to dish out second rate visuals because the web is so commonplace. I disagree with this notion -- strongly.
So why are so many sites still snubbing the W3C and why should I care?
I care because I genuinely believe that the web is a much better place and a much more controllable beast when everyone is shooting at the same goal. I care because it shows me that the owner of X, Y, or Z site cares about their business. They want me, the customer, to have a smooth experience. They've taken the trouble to look after the front-end, and so I am, experience is telling me, far more likely to trust them to shop with, for example, as I believe more time will have been spent on security too.
Why are so many still snubbing the standards? I can only presume it's down to a combination of laziness and ignorance. Many people, I know, think they can put it off and "do it at the end". It never works that way around. You either care to make it happen at the start, or, again in my experience, you don't care at all, let alone care enough to bolt it on at the end.
One thing I do know is that the number of people who, like me, care a great deal, is not getting smaller. Some day it's going to be too important to ignore, as the cost of doing so will drive an unacceptable number of visitors away from the site, as that number seek to find sites which match their ideals. The days where we could just say "content is king" and sleep well at night are, I fear, long gone.
MazY
8 Comments
Also does this conformity lead to an increased ease of hacking? (I don't know but it seems like it could) as well as increasingly easy to steal other people's formats for your own use.
maybe I'mm completely off the mark, this is just an initial response.
For the life of me I cannot imagine, even for a second, how conforming to W3C standards would ease hacking. On the contrary - I would expect those who can't be bothered to take the few extra steps required to be W3C compliant, to be less capable in the arena of site security too.
One thing I do know for certain is that sites are a damned sight easier to debug when you are 100% confident that the code is W3C compliant in the first place.
Does that make sense?
If we spent our time fully adhering to W3C there is no way that we would get all the features out. As a start-up we can't do everything, we have to weigh up the pros and cons of each thing that we could do and make a judgement call on priority. At this moment in time we choose features over W3C compliance.
Of course, this isn't to say that we don't think about W3C compliance. We do. It's just that as our framework starts to get bigger, and exceptions creep in, it becomes more difficult to follow the purist approach.
And as we start to do really fancy stuff like our submit 1,2,3 form it's very difficult.
Pragmatism is the main issue.
You may be interested to know that most of Google's development is done on java, and they have a "publish to Web" button. Their compiler converts the Java to HTML & Javascript.
If you have a look at Google's HTML & .js, you will see there is barely a hint of W3C compliance...
Is this bad? Not in my opinion. They have fantastic apps and they have developed a great way of deploying them.
It's pragmatic and it works!
(Not to mention that W3C compliance bloats downloads with all the extra tags)
I make money from doing precisely what you say is not possible in the real world - developing sites that are 100% W3C compliant. In fact, I wouldn't have the nerve these days to deliver a site which is, by any standard, broken.
Our CMS is another example: It's an OS project, which is easily as complex as woyano, I suspect, with just two people behind it, and yet, it is 100% W3C compliant. How do you explain that? I can safely say that it hasn't been W3C compliance that has slowed us down. If anything, it's been IE6's poor support of standards.
As for all the extra tags bloating code -- that's just clutching at straws, surely? Can you give me one example of this? Logically, it makes no sense to me at all, unless you're going out of your way to miss things like < p > tags, which would be just plain wreckless and lazy.
(And for that matter why do they need one?)
"I make money from doing precisely what you say is not possible in the real world" - I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said it wasn't easy
"Our CMS is another example" - Yup. Your open source, all the time in the world, low pressure, no cost for man hours, example.
I challenge anyone to be face to face with real investors who have millions on the line... and tell them that you couldn't roll out a feature because you wanted to spend time making the html w3c compliant.
As I say. It's possible, but not always easy. w3c is our long term gloal, and our short term "try to do it when we can".
We choose customer experience and features as our top priority in this highly volatile stage of our start-up.
Also, It may be a lot easier for you to dev. w3c as you go because you have lots of experience working that way. That experience came at a cost, time & learning, once again in high burn start-up situation that is purist luxury time that our team doesn't have right now.
Basically I agree with your sentiment, but do not believe in the black and white argument. In my opinion nothing is black and white, always room for grey areas :)
You also seem to be pulling examples from extremes - such as Google, which, by the very definition of what it does, is going to chew bandwidth like there's no sunset, and start-ups which are looking for investment. In those respects, even I would have to give a cursory nod of agreement, as much as it would pain me. However, the fact is that for the vast majority who don't make any attempt to comply to W3C standards, don't fall into these groups, or anything like them.
I further suspect that a great many don't even bother to look at how easy or hard it is. You then mention that customer experience and features is your priority, but as I found the other day, if you visit the homepage in IE6, the experience is, well, a poor one. (Enough that if I used that poor excuse for a web browser, I would never have returned.). And so you seem to want your cake and eat it, to a degree, it seems. A "beta" tucked away in a logo doesn't negate such things in my view. That's just down to poor testing. I don't say this to pick on you or the site, I really don't. Merely to illustrate the point that, often, the reasons I am given for not adhering to standards don't stack up when I look at the detail.
Now had it have been W3C compliant, I would have looked at your code and sent you a quick CSS fix for IE6 in an instant. Because I could see that the code was fundamentally faulty anyway, I didn't. As I've said before, whichever way you look at it, standard code that everyone can refer to, will always be superior to code that only the author can fathom. (I'm not saying Woyano's code is THAT bad!)
Hey you know AdGuy always gets the last word! ;)