KillerSites Blog

How important is web standards and clean xhtml in the real world?

November 24, 2006

podcast_icon

With all these Web standards zealots running around proudly placing W3C validation buttons on their websites, you have to ask yourself:

Does anyone really care about web standards, clean code (xhtml, html and css) in the real world?

THE SAD TRUTH

Only in large companies (if you’re lucky,) and government might you find someone that may care. Sorry zealots, you can take down your little W3C buttons now …

🙂

The web design community codes itself into an academic dreamland sometimes. That’s why I attacked the web-standards-movement in the past … the leaders were misleading the ‘faithful’ down the path to the unemployment line.

PAYING WEB DESIGN, IS ABOUT BUSINESS

At the end of the day, all this web design junk is there to do, is to get out a message.

As for business, they don’t care about code validation and other nerd stuff that the web design zealots have fooled everyone into believing really means anything in the real world.

A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL FOR CODE-MONKEYS

But in the programming world, code quality moves to the front – well near the front of the line. This is because good code means faster more adaptable software – this has a bottom-line ($) affect.

… On the other hand:

Clean, standards compliant web design code (html/xhtml and css,) does not have any financial impact for most sites:

In the days of super cheap hosting and bandwidth, saving a few kilobytes on a web page amounts to nothing – most of us are not building sites that have millions of page-views!

So if you’re a frustrated web designer who is obsessed with code, you should get into php programming!

By Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com