2 Responses to “To Comply or Not Comply (with W3C)?”

1. gilray4 Says:
   December 16th, 2005 at 9:37 pm

   As someone that does a lot of coding, yet is relatively new to computing I feel conformation to standards is important. I have friends that are standards evangelists, and others that live by “If it displays the way I want in Internet-explorer… screw validation.”
   Certainly conformation turns to repetitive procedure which turns to dogmatic practices, which in turn can stifle progress. The same progress that conformity originally enhanced.
   In my limited computing experience though, I have reached the conclusion that all of humanity’s computing is in a relatively infant state. Our technologies have a long way to go, and will do so at an amazing rate over the next few decades if not longer.
   With out a standard to go by we are all running around “willy nilly”. No standards allows for such nonsense as “browser wars” which in turn opens the doors for greedy business people to, through economic might create an artificial supremacy based on economics rather than a “better mouse trap”. With adherence to standards we foster a level playing field for developers. New programs and applications rise to prominence because they are better engineered, better thought out or simply “work better, faster, easier”, not simply because they are “the only show in town”.
   Certain business communities have grossly stifled development by creating proprietary programs and applications. In turn creating a reliance on those “not so great” technologies, simply for the sake of padding their own pockets.
   I would be the first to admit that at a certain point strict adherence to a status quo or older technology who’s time has come and perhaps long should’ve gone, can be counter productive too advancement. A good example of breaking standards for the good of progress, when PHP first came on the scene there was many things about it that would not pass W3C standards. Most of these have been resolved and we now have as a product a wonderful new technology.
   I could go on with this oblique sort of talk. However here is one basic, IMO huge reason to conform to w3c standards and the use of code “validation”. validation is too me an invaluable tool for finding and correcting perhaps fatal mistakes and over sites in my coding. If you don’t “validate as you go” and things are fine for half the development process but then your code breaks,
   what good is a validation tool to find the source of the errant behavior, if the your code is already swimming in errors ?

   [Ed. Thanks for the thoughtful comments. I think I agree generally with everything you say. We try very hard to conform to W3C around here. I did fix a couple of minor typo’s in your post. If I changed anything wrong, let me know. I hope that is okay, but I wanted to be sure someone searching didn’t miss your comments because of a minor typo. The if it happens to display right in what I am using method definitely causes problems! Don]

2. freewsopchips.net Says:
   March 23rd, 2018 at 6:01 pm

   Thanks that is all the way.