W3C Standards: Are they really important?
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Topic: W3C Standards: Are they really important?
Posted By: javi712
Subject: W3C Standards: Are they really important?
Date Posted: 22 December 2006 at 3:44pm
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Well, I was on another topic in which a member was complaining about some icons not having a title tag. Which brought me to this discussion. Are W3C standards really important?
I think the main point of a website is to get a message out. If you offer information, I'm sure visitors will get the info they need and move on. I highly doubt they'll view your source code or mouse over all your images to verify if your site is W3C complaint. If you offer a businees, I'm sure future clients and other businesses might be interested in what you offer and will be thinking, I can make extra money here. I'm sure a missing title tag or two somewhere on your website will not turn off a business deal. So what is all the fuss about W3C standards? I just don't get it! |
Replies:
Posted By: WebWiz-Bruce
Date Posted: 22 December 2006 at 4:25pm
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I personally think W3C standards are good, but you can take things a bit to far. It's like most things sometimes a good balance is better, for example I'm developing a site at the moment and some pages have over 40 1 pixel spacers images, in reality would you want or even need to give an ALT and Title tag to each spacer image? For things like buttons, icons, pictures, etc. you should always use ALT tags and it's also good for visually impaired people and in that respect the W3C standards are good, but would a visually impaired person want their speaking browser to read 'This is a 1 pixel spacer' over 40 times? To them this type of information is not needed, and in this type of example I think the W3C standards need to be taken with a pinch of salt. ------------- https://www.webwiz.net/web-wiz-forums/forum-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - Web Wiz Forums Hosting https://www.webwiz.net/web-hosting/windows-web-hosting.htm" rel="nofollow - ASP.NET Web Hosting |
Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 22 December 2006 at 4:26pm
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There's a commonly held belief in the SEO community that Search Engines do a better job of indexing valid html. - e.g. they assign more weight to header content than to paragraph content so if you put a paragraph tag in the middle of your header tags, you're discounting the header content. - <h1><p>Some Content</p></h1> - "Some Content" is weighted as a Paragraph - not as a header. Btowsers will display it, but the SE's aren't indexing your page properly. Same thing applies to using Title tags - SE's add more value for text in a title tag and also look to see if similar text is within the pages content. So yes, the main purpose of a site is to get a message out but that purpose gets diluted by invalid html. FWIW... 80% of my work is with IT departments, and they always validate. The remainder of my work is for smaller companies. I'm not at all shy about pointing out to them that whoever I'm in competition with for the job are bozo's who "can't even code correctly". You can bet that if your customer won't detect invalid coding, your competitors will and will point that out to your customers. They can "prove" you're incompetent. ------------- 
Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me. |
Posted By: Mikey
Date Posted: 23 December 2006 at 3:31am
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Sometimes good, sometimes pointless. It all depends what your developing and who for. Alot of the set rules are there for a good reason but some of them i can't see why people sat down and finalised them because they make no sense  ------------- Handyman man? |
Posted By: javi712
Date Posted: 23 December 2006 at 4:00am
| Thanks guys. This isn't the first time I've seen someone bring up the point of W3C standards, so that's why I brought it up in a discussion. I personally have never paid much mind to W3C standards. I code my sites either with tables or CSS and always test with different browsers. As long as they all function correctly with all browsers, that was good enough for me. Surprisingly enough no one has every brought up the issue of W3C standards with my websites before. |
Posted By: the boss
Date Posted: 23 December 2006 at 8:39pm
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if you want a fast car..do you really care how much "green" it is??? no
so a visually pleasent and informative site is more appealing than ALT tags and W3 standards ------------- http://www.web2messenger.com/theboss"> 
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Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 24 December 2006 at 1:49am
You make it sound like it's an either/or choice. W3 standards and visually appealing information are not mutually exclusive. You can have both, It just takes a little thought up front. It's not harder to do, in fact, it's usually faster to do. The issue with conforming to standards has nothing to do with visuals, speed of development, or just to be able to claim that you meet standards. The issue is Search Bots. You get better SEO from valid code than from invalid code. EDIT: Also... The whole purpose behind alt tags is when the site is not visually appealing - e.g. for vision impaired people. -------------
Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me. |
the boss wrote:Posted By: djlurch
Date Posted: 24 December 2006 at 3:58am
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dpyers: Great information about standards! For the webware I develop, W3C standards aren't important at all, since none of it is designed for the public. For public sites, I don't spend a lot of time on validating. I have a different view of the web, so SEO is less important to me and some of my clients. What is far more important is that the sites work well across multiple browsers. I should work harder on putting out correct code...as the methods to access website is changing (PDA/Vision Impaired/etc). DP: Any tips for us "hackers" :) that aren't up on Validating? For anyone that's interested in an XHTML/W3C discussion go here: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/28/131246 |
Posted By: dpyers
Date Posted: 24 December 2006 at 4:17pm
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I think the best way is to loose the transitional doctypes that keep browsers in quirks mode and to use HTML 4.01 strict. The W3C validator will point out the major html errors. You wind up with some lean html. For the vast majority of sites, less than 100 lines of pretty basic CSS are going to be enough. Doing css for body, p, h1-h3, a, ol/ul and td tags covers most of it. Almost anything else is going to be variations of those tags for specific divs on a page. Using % or em units instead of px or pt gives you a lot of device/resolution independence. I'm not a rabid advocate of never using tables for layout - (e.g. for tabular data only). But most of my sites are css layout - tons of templates available but I use about three basic layouts - 1, 2, and 3 columns with headers and footers. I have them stored in TopStyle Pro - which IMHO, is the CSS Editor. I started coding in 1970. The only thing constant in my coding has been the learning of new languages, techniques and methodologies. If you don't want to continually learn new things, you're in the wrong business. The world moves on. Hell, Even MS dropped FrontPage in favor of a standards/css based editor. Regarding Doctypes... Transitional Doctypes were instituted a dozen years ago as a mechanism to aid legacy code to get to standards (Strict Doctype). After 12 years it's time to stop transiting and to actually arrive. Same with CSS. It turns 10 years old this month. Time to be there. I'm not a big fan of XHTML. Don't see any point to it if the site isn't AJAX or isn't going to use XSL's/XSLT's, or isn't being fed info from external sources. EDIT: Link for CSS Tables - http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/ - http://icant.co.uk/csstablegallery/ -------------
Lead me not into temptation... I know the short cut, follow me. |
Posted By: javi712
Date Posted: 24 December 2006 at 8:01pm
| Great site... thanks for the link Dpyers!! |
Posted By: scottage
Date Posted: 09 January 2007 at 3:42pm
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IMHO there is no choice, xHTML & CSS always; then consideration for all possible visual imparements (contract levels, alternative CSS, etc.) BUT should it always have validate? Well, NO. An example; if you use an embed tag to put flash into your HTML this will not validate because <embed> is not an xHTML tag so to make valid xHTML you just add a script call to write the <embed> tag into the HTML, the ultimate result as seen by your browser is the same but the code with the script WILL validate! ------------- http://www.realwebdevelopers.com" rel="nofollow - Developing real world websites |
Posted By: MrMellie
Date Posted: 25 January 2007 at 10:19am
| I'd also like to add that adhering to the sensible parts of W3C (as already discussed here) also helps you stay within the law here in the UK! Our overseas friends may not realise that we have a disability discrimination law that requires websites be accesable by disabled people. For instance ALT tagging images means their text readers tell them something informative about the image. Decent page layout helps them navigate properly too. Failing to make an accessible site could land you in hot water, though unless you're a particularly mainstream site you could probably get away with it. |
Posted By: MortiOli
Date Posted: 26 January 2007 at 2:12pm
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MrMellie, I've heard about that before - there was quite a big site that got sued / near to being sued, for not being coded correctly for the visually impared (sp!?) |
Posted By: jeffdaro
Date Posted: 27 January 2007 at 1:50am
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I think the W3C is necessary and important, but if your site presents nicely but is coded like crap...who cares? I understand the whole help the blind surf the internet, and proper code will help your SEO...but IMHO content is king. If you have the content that people want, your site will soar even if it's written on the back of a napkin. |