W3C Standards: Are they really important?

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/


Edited by dpyers - 24 December 2006 at 4:32pm

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!

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!?)