I read a really good article today by Ethan Marcotte.
We can all agree that the realities of the web make it hard to build a standards-compliant site. Once the client’s CMS, outdated WYSIWYG editors, and third-party advertising code have finished with once-valid markup, things begin to look ever-so-ugly under the hood; this leads many to suggest, like Bowman, that an insistence on validation is at odds with commercial web design. Given that most of these invalid sites look fine in a browser, the amount of time and money required to produce perfectly valid final code seems not only prohibitive, but pointless.
The article goes on to talk about how to make the business case for following standards (something we are familiar with at Pop Art). But still, what about this problem of taking the time to make a standards compliant site versus building the flashiest, sexiest site as quickly as possible (you got to make a profit to stay in business, right)? Or can you do both? Should you do both? Should you pick one over the other and if so, which one?
None of this changes the here and now. To be honest, the pragmatists
are right: that for the most part, validation and commercial web design
are polar opposites. But the tools are evolving to the point where we
can begin moving beyond validation as a roadblock, and CMSes like WordPress and Slashcode are dedicated to producing standards-compliant code; visual editors such as Dreamweaver and (more recently) Microsoft Expression Web almost stubbornly refuse to produce invalid markup. So where do we go from here?
I really like how he highlighted MS Expressions. So how do we move forward? Is it just with these new tools? Is that what allows us to be able to deliver sexy, standards-compliant sites? In short, yes, but Ethan makes a good point that there also has to be more.
But in all honesty, the real work begins with us. Regardless of whether we find validation impractical or imperative, the infighting in the standards community is the biggest obstacle to real progress. Instead of trying to understand what factors make both sides agitated, we’ve vilified the people on the other side of the argument. We need to identify what’s making 100% validation so expensive and difficult, and work on removing those factors.
Huh. So what do you think? Are you doing standards-compliant sites? How much effort do you spend to make sure that your sites will validate? Is validation important to you, or is it just a "nice-to-have"? I'm interested to hear if you're not doing standards-compliant sites and why. The follow-up to that question would be asking how soon do you plan on making the change to producing only standard-compliant sites. If you're open to sharing, please share.