To change your work-flow to satisfy such a small audience or to be ‘prepared’ for something the MAY come at some unknown time in the future is akin to the building of bomb shelters in the 50’s - just in case of nuclear war.

What is the practical way to tackle this:

When I see the browsers come out (that require strict XHTML,) and they have some reasonable presence on the web, I will look to moving from HTML 4.

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The IE7 thing is kinda cool (in an academic sense,) but it relies on JavaScript - where about 10% of the people out there have it turned off.

I don’t like having crucial functionality dependent on JavaScript because of that 10%.

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Even in strict mode, IE still has bugs that require the use of hacks to make page-level layout via CSS to work - AFAIK.

Again, that being said, I can’t wait for the majority of the users to be using a non-buggy version of IE - give it another 2-3 years.

Meanwhile there are times (when deadlines are looming,) when we may want to use code that may not be 100% standards compliant to get the job done.

Remember that standards are created to save time and money, as soon as the standards get in the way of this, it’s time to break them.

Conclusion:

I have the benefit of years of experience with several programming languages (Java, PHP, JavaScript etc) where I’ve seen this sort of thing several times before:

Where people get caught up in theoretical correctness at the expense of practical application.

One thing these people don’t realise is that standards are not written in stone … they are not the ten commandments. You should also consider that things change, sometimes in a big way! So coding for the future, at the expense of today, is silly given my experience.

Curious, I don’t know if any of the ‘leaders’ of the Web Standards movement have any programming experience at all? That to me is relevant because CSS and HTML is to programming, as adding and subtracting is to advanced calculus.

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I’m not trying to get on a lecture tour or am I trying to sell books - I am only offering this point of view to help people avoid some of the mistakes I have made in the past.

(You should) do what you will.

I personally would rather use the target instead of staying 100% compliant and using javascript. But if its not really needed then I’ll just leave it away as much as possible.

For lots of things there is a logical explanation, and if you are good in CSS there is no real need to use hacks (if using strict mode or using the /IE7/ javascript all in one fix)

Browsers will cache images whether they are found in the HTML code or the CSS - once an image is in cache, the browser will call the cached version regardless of what page the image is found.
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Your Google example is an example of just bad design - you could have made the table based layout more ‘Google friendly’ by reducing the number of tables (nesting tables was silly even before CSSP was possible,) and by extracting the JavaScript into a .js file and making a reference to it at the bottom of the page.

That being said:

When I can, I go for CSSP (web standards) based design as much as possible. And as far as I know, the only time CSS falls down, is when it comes to page-level layout.

About XHTML:

XHTML will typically be treated by the browsers as ordinary HTML (because of the web servers,) thus removing all the supposed advantages - it’s not checked if it well formed by the browser for example.

To force the browser to read XHTML as XHTML, you will need to set the MIME type to: application/xhtml+xml. The problem is that Internet Explorer (this means 70-90% of the users,) does not support application/xhtml+xml.

As such, IE (and other browsers,) will give you the ‘download this document’ dialog rather than rendering and displaying the page like it’s supposed to …

Conclusion:

Whether you’re going to bust your ass to create CSSP based pages comes down to a project’s needs and the particular layout - some CSSP layouts are easily achieved with only the need for one hack to work. I do this for Killersites.com.

But, I think that there are times when being 100% web standards compliant is just a waste of time - like not using the target attribute of a link () tag; who cares and what practical disadvantage is there to using this very useful attribute?

>> This is not pro web-standards this is pro CSS although I think web-standards are a good thing

[..]Myth #2: Your websites will be forward compatible.[..]This is very unlikely since they (browser makers,) don’t have a history of removing functionality - they probably don’t want to kill the tens of millions of web pages that are built using ‘old-style’ techniques.[..]

True BUT did you consider that if someone was to manufacture a new browser without all that bad history that your site would look awful if you didn’t use standards (doesn’t have to but could)
Example: Safari, relatively young has no quirks-mode only a standards mode.

[..]The evidence would say otherwise - there are many top ranked websites that use old-style web design techniques.[..]
That is because they have huge amounts of sites linked to them, this compromises for the big amounts of code (table based site) the code part.
It is a fact that if you have two sites on the web and one is built up of tables that google will prefer the other one without the tables and with the clean (standard) code

Example: I had to remake a site that used huge amounts of javascript and tables because google wouldn’t list it. Once I cleared all that junk out google started listing it again. This was because google just stops reading a document after some time of not finding anything interesting. (this is a fact, look it up on lots of sites, most none standard. Even they say that if you put to much text or code on a page that google will only index the first part of it and leave the rest.)

Truth: using CSS and making your sites the new-school way makes them easier to maintain

I like web-standards.
They help me making better pages and studying them helped me understand and organize better my work.

But.
Not all my pages validate at 100%. And this does not makes sleeping any harder, I’m just fine this way.

I agree that “Mystical belief in the power of Web Standards, Usability, and tableless CSS” is a stupid thing, and making complex hack is the last thing I’ll do in order to have simple code.