Are your sites 100% standards compliant (CSS & XHTML)?

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Are your sites 100% standards compliant (CSS & XHTML)?

I don't care about compliance as long as the client is happy
2
5%
Why bother with compliance when most existing websites don't?
0
No votes
Why bother with compliance when the majority browser doesn't?
0
No votes
I'm trying to keep my sites compliant, but it takes too much time
2
5%
Some of my sites are pretty much standards compliant
6
16%
All of my sites are pretty much standards compliant
21
55%
All of my sites are 100% standards compliant
7
18%
 
Total votes: 38

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patrikG
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Are your sites 100% standards compliant (CSS & XHTML)?

Post by patrikG »

Are your sites 100% standards compliant (CSS & XHTML)?
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John Cartwright
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Post by John Cartwright »

I mean, it really isn't that dificult to make your sites compliant. Perhaps at first, but believe me, once you get into the swings of things it becomes second nature.

Although, it can be a daunting task to rewrite existing projects for compliancy (especially those with hundreds of template files), but then again it should have been compliant in the first place ;)
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patrikG
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Post by patrikG »

I still find it a major task, given that IE is not standards compliant and frequently buggers up for some highly obscure reason on which you'll have to spend hours upon hours to fix. "Here: HTML & CSS validate fine, show correctly in every browser but IE..." - how often have I heard that.

I'm not talking about a cute little project here, a little <table> here, a <p> there - just take CSS: position: fixed - and how IE handles it, or just changing <DOCTYPE> of a validated and 100% XHTML compliant page and how that makes IE keel over. Laughable. In a production environment, especially for smaller companies, time is of the essence and if the site looks good in the major browsers, I believe many are willing to sacrifice standard compliance.
Last edited by patrikG on Tue Apr 04, 2006 5:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Burrito
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Post by Burrito »

I do my best to make my sites compliant.

since I use IE as my primary browser, I typically work the other way around which, for all intents and purposes, seems to work just fine :D
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Nathaniel
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Post by Nathaniel »

I voted for "All of my sites are pretty much standards compliant."

I strive to comply with all of the standards, and I don't use CSS hacks or the like that make my code fail in w3c's validator. (I like the <!--[if IE]--> one, though :)) But if I need an autocomplete="off" attribute, for example, I'd think I'd give up the nice "XHTML 1.1 Compliant" tag on my site to not have to worry about using javascript to add the attribute.

So it depends, I guess.
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John Cartwright
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Post by John Cartwright »

patrikG wrote:I still find it a major task, given that IE is not standards compliant and frequently buggers up for some highly obscure reason on which you'll have to spend hours upon hours to fix. "Here: HTML & CSS validate fine, show correctly in every browser but IE..." - how often have I heard that.

I'm not talking about a cute little project here, a little <table> here, a <p> there - just take CSS: position: fixed - and how IE handles it. Laughable. In a production environment, especially for smaller companies, time is of the essence and if the site looks good in the major browsers, I believe many are willing to sacrifice standard compliance.
Yea, thats the other side of the story. I'm sure we all have run into a couple scenarios where something needed to be done asap, where it simply was worth sacraficing a minor compliancy issue.

I havn't really had much opportuniy to work on projects without it being exposed general public, but I do understand what your saying.
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hawleyjr
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Post by hawleyjr »

Burrito wrote:since I use IE as my primary browser, I typically work the other way around which, for all intents and purposes, seems to work just fine :D
/*SLAPPS BURRITO 8O
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R4000
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Post by R4000 »

i don't code for standards at all, unless requested.

all of my sites are pretty much standard complient (1 or 2 errors)
but thats cause imma good designer.
Roja
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Post by Roja »

Had to vote "pretty much", because Blacknova Traders isn't yet. Yet.
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hawleyjr
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Post by hawleyjr »

R4000 wrote:i don't code for standards at all, unless requested.
****ONLY MY OPINION****

It's that attitude why there are so many sites that aren't standard and why there are so many fly-by-night dev shops. If all developers were to get on the same page and use the same standards, development and browser interactivity would be much better. Most of us do this professionally; that means we have to design professionally. Name any other field where people skip out on standards so much..? For example if an electrician were to just not care for standards anymore; imagine what would happen. I don't think he/she would be in the business for very long. Designing sites w/o concern for standards indicates lack of knowledge, a lazy developer and an unprofessional developer. IMHO :)

Now on another note, I'm as guilty as the next guy. I have plenty of projects and sites that were coded to be coded and not coded right. But lately (Last couple years) I’ve done my best to reach as many standards as possible.
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Buddha443556
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Post by Buddha443556 »

Voted, "Pretty Much." The layout is usually valid for the standard I'm using, be it HTML 4.01 or XHTML.
In a production environment, especially for smaller companies, time is of the essence and if the site looks good in the major browsers, I believe many are willing to sacrifice standard compliance.
After the initial layout ... well I admit it I'm not perfect. I put up a page while I was on the phone today. When I went back I found a couple of errors, they'll get fixed on the next sync. :oops:
"Here: HTML & CSS validate fine, show correctly in every browser but IE..." - how often have I heard that.
Italic text? :lol: IE is a great way to legitimately increase your billable hours. Thanks Microsoft!
khendar
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Post by khendar »

I'm another "Pretty much" voter. I try my darndest to make my xhtml and css valid. In fact its the basis of my current project (standards compatible CMS).

Unfortunately there are just too many things which can bugger it up.

I've gotten used to using one particular set of excellent CSS templates for most of my sites (Thanks Ruthsarian). 100% valid and very customisable. Then all you have to worry about is what you stick in it.
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RobertGonzalez
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Post by RobertGonzalez »

Pretty much all for me. I am in the process of getting things up to compliance for at least Transitional. I am working on a few that are XHTML Strict. Having read recently that there is an abundant gowth of users using user agents (man, does that look as funny as it sounds in my head?) that are not your typical web browser the need for a strict adherence to standards is becoming more and more important.

I do agree that when time does not allow for compliant development (I also believe this is rare - do it right the first time so there is no second time) that you can put up whatever gets the job done visually, but you should at least attempt to make the thing compliant when there is time. But this whole standards compliant movement has almost gotten me excited about markup again. Kinda like when I first started writing HTML. I am trying my hardest to write compliant code the first time around.

On a side note, I always develop for Firefox first, then tweak for Opera and Explorer. IE just <span style='color:blue' title='I'm naughty, are you naughty?'>smurf</span> me off to the point that I get so fed up I stop developing to go eat entire cheesecakes when things don't work right. So if it renders in Firefox the way I know it should, and it kinda looks right in IE, so be it. I know, I know, IE has like a 99.9% market saturation when it comes to available browsers, but how is anyone going to know that other, better alternatives exists if we don't let people know?
matthijs
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Post by matthijs »

One thing that I always find strange when questions like this come up is this:

The suggestion/idea that trying to develop a standards compliant site is harder and/or takes more time.

I don't get that. How can that be? For me validation is the first thing I do while developing a webpage. It's a tool which makes it easier for me, not harder. The validator is like a spell checker. I could read an article I wrote 5 times and still miss some silly typo. But using a good spell checker does find those mistakes in the time it takes me to click my mouse button. The same for the validator. One click on a button and a few seconds after that you'll have all your errors. A few minutes later and those are solved.

Not validating will only make it harder ro design the page and will make it much harder to get it right cross-browser.

Also, using webstandards and seperating content from presentation makes pages much lighter. That will make designing the page for friendly printing, mobile browsers or other ways so much easier. That saves time. Making small changes to the design will be much easier, and therefore cheaper.

The only way not using standards would save time would be to design a website in photoshop and then putting up one big 1280px by 800px jpg as the webpage.

And about the market share Everah mentions: statistics are difficult to rely on but I do know that for most sites I see/work on the IE share is about 70-80% now, with FF taking a good second place with 10-20%. And those are all kinds of public sites, definately not only some webdesigner's blogs which get a specific audience. So I think we are past the time that it's ok to design only for IE because "everyone uses it". I cannot imagine a business which doesn't care about the experience for those 1 in 5 visitors.
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patrikG
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Post by patrikG »

matthijs wrote:One thing that I always find strange when questions like this come up is this:

The suggestion/idea that trying to develop a standards compliant site is harder and/or takes more time.

I don't get that. How can that be? For me validation is the first thing I do while developing a webpage. It's a tool which makes it easier for me, not harder. The validator is like a spell checker. I could read an article I wrote 5 times and still miss some silly typo. But using a good spell checker does find those mistakes in the time it takes me to click my mouse button. The same for the validator. One click on a button and a few seconds after that you'll have all your errors. A few minutes later and those are solved.
Take a small website I've designed quickly for a friend: http://www.advanceenergy.co.uk/design - when I do a design, I do it in Firefox first and everything else later. Everything works fine, everything validates <table>-tags have summaries etc. Now, I look at the page in IE and the navigation bar at the bottom is not fixed, nor aligned. I check with Opera, Konqueror - works fine. So, I develop a separate stylesheet for IE, have to change the HTML around and even though it all should be working, it's not. Great. Eventually, it turns out that if I change the <doctype> to "HTML 4.01 Transitional", the <div> at the bottom seems to be holding.

Great, so now the site isn't standards compliant anymore, but works in the four major browsers. If you manage to find a way to implement the design of that site in a standards compliant way and it works in IE, FF, Opera and Konqueror - I would hand it to you: "Ha! patrikG knows nada about standards and is not compliant." I'd even go so far and put it in my sig for a week.
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