W3C Standards: Are they really important?

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!

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.

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.

the boss wrote: 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

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.


Edited by dpyers - 24 December 2006 at 1:53am