Why Most Sites Don’t Bother With Web Standards
If you are a coder, and you are proud to write valid XHTML and CSS based sites, you’ve probably noticed many big sites like Google.com, Yahoo.com, etc, don’t have valid code and in fact have warnings, and the odd error, according to the results I get when I use my HTML Tidy Firefox add-on.
So why is that? You would think that the developers for those sites are top-notch and well-versed in current web standards. And the answer is, the average visitor to these sites don’t give a fig about web standards and are not viewing source code when they are browsing, searching the web, or whatever. Those web giants know that the single most important thing on the web is to provide what people are looking for and that is information.
Content is far more important then whether HTML code is perfectly formatted. The average site visitor doesn’t know and doesn’t care about perfect code. Web designers who code according to web standards are appreciated by some, I’m sure , but they are really only judged by their peers. Web designers and their clients need only worry about how to please the target market of the web site. Nothing else matters.
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November 3rd, 2008 at 2:26 pm
While I can appreciate your perspective, Karen, your reasoning is superficial and your point is fallacious and could only be detrimental to the web if broadly accepted.
I cannot and will not argue with you that content is ultimate reason that a user would flock to a website — it is, as they say, king — but it cannot be separated as you have done from its mark-up. Browsers are not magical boxes that transport content from one computer to your senses through a mysterious ether; they and the internet operate under certain technological conditions. One of those conditions is that the browser is told what content to display and how to display it by a document’s mark-up. As such, content and mark-up have a symbiotic relationship; the medium, literally speaking, is the message.
This leads to two problems with the answer to your “why is that?” question: the first is that users really do care about web standards, despite mark-up being transparent to the vast majority of them; the second is that users’ opinions or awareness of web standards have little to do with the actual answer to your question.
“Why is that,” you might ask. You may then ask, “Why is the second?” Fair questions, both, and both have answers. To address the first point, I’ll use an analogy: think of how many persons watch television on a daily basis (hint: it’s a lot). Now, those persons may not “give a fig,” as you so fruitfully put it, about the television broadcast spectrum or satellite transmissions or RF tuners. Proportionately few of them are likely to be physicists or electrical engineers, and maybe a few more have an understanding of electromagnetic radiation. Still, if one day all television channels changed the way they transmitted their broadcasts to something not implemented by any television manufacturer, there would be a lot of rightfully unhappy TV owners.
So, the first reason your supposition is incorrect is that people care very much about the standards that govern the use of their technology, whether or not they do so actively. standards ensure that things work together the way they’re meant to, and improper functionality is bad, mmmkay?
On to the second point! Yes, website administrators — well a few of them, at least — make an effort to design their site to suit their target demographic. No, this is not why your HTML Tidy extension recoils in disgust at Google’s mark-up. Google et al. do employ web standards. Their HTML is recognizable as such, and their CSS looks upon first inspection to genuinely be CSS. These are standards that have been developed and proven over the life of the internet; a designer would be foolish to ignore them outright.
Still, you’re right: many a site’s source doesn’t adhere perfectly to the standards as they are defined on paper, but it’s an issue of practicality, not revolt. In some cases the standards aren’t sufficient because they haven’t yet evolved to support new ideas or technologies. In others, it may be necessary because a browser’s implementation of the standards doesn’t match the specification word for word (cough—IE—cough) and so they must make certain allowances.
Ideally, every browser would have a “perfect” implementation of every standard, and standardization of new web technologies would proceed at a quick enough pace to prevent browser makers or site administrators from being left to their own devices. What a wonderful thing it would be to know that we were all experiencing the web they way it was intended to be experienced. Until then, we must make sacrifices as necessary, recognize that the need to bend standards doesn’t beget a reason to abandon them altogether, and laud those designers who are able to produce standards-compliant source code as beacons to whom all should flock for examples of how the web should be.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
It’s like this:
Content is king. There’s no getting around that. However, it’s important that the content is delivered in a way that the user is willing to consume it. Content that displays poorly will likely not be consumed, at which time the “king” is useless. Standards are a way to make sure your content is showing properly to everyone.
Having said that, I’d like to point out that while the purpose of standards is to make your content show properly, that’s not always (often not actually) the case. Too many browsers don’t properly implement the standards. As such, often exceptions must be made or hours need to be dumped into finding “standards” that all browsers implement the same. At this point you often hit a cost issue, where the cost outweighs the benefit. That’s business. There are plenty of places that ignore other “best practices” in order to save money too. Maybe the best practice is to pay your workers to harvest the cacao that makes your chocolate, but there are some major chocolate companies that cust this corner by using slavery instead. It’s not right, but it’s profitable.
Lastly, and again in the vein of cost cutting, sometimes ignoring standards allows you to use less code (and still works in all browsers). For most people it’s a negligible difference, but you used Google as an example and if you think about how many hits google.com gets in a day, they probably save a lot on bandwidth by NOT offering a doctype for example.
In the end, I think standards matter. It lets web browsers and developers work toward the same goal. Without them, you’d be writing completely different code for each browser (what if they said we don’t like “div”, we’ll use “box” and what is “a” anyway, let’s use “link”). However, as important as I think they are, I would definitely agree that they are not the only thing to consider when creating a site.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Josh,
Fallacious? That’s a little dramatic, isn’t it? I like clean valid code. I believe in web standards. But many many web sites are able to display their content to their users and are using invalid code.
For example, YouTube encourages the use of the “embed” tag so that users can insert YouTube videos on their sites. Embed has long since been unapproved by the W3C.
There are thousands and thousands of sites using deprecated code. Bu that doesn’t stop them from being wildly popular. It doesn’t affect their page rank, their traffic, and their bottom line, does it?
The point to my article was that the average Internet user doesn’t know or care about web standards, valid code, and all the other intricacies of the Internet. All the average user wants is access to information, products, services, downloads, etc.
I have clients who use WordPress. I do custom installs, consult with them, tweak things for them, etc…but unless I give them lessons in XHTML, they usually invalidate their WordPress blogs because they use HTML instead of XHTML in their posts and pages. Most of the time their messy code still works and it’s really only web designers who are really paying any attention to whether the code is clean and adheres to web standards.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:52 am
Quality post but even better comments. I agree with all three of you. It's like I wrote in http://www.attackr.com/structuring-your-html-code...
"Is it worth spending time on structuring it [the code] probably? After all it doesn’t affect anything. Spiders don’t care and general users won’t notice as they won’t check your source code, most people don’t even know what that is. In general, if you can say that no-one is going to look at your source code, then structuring is meaningless."
Of course I'm only talking about structuring the code, not the difference between following web-standards or not. But the principle is quite similar in both cases.
February 25th, 2009 at 9:30 am
well written by Xavisys
March 25th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
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