When starting to get interested in web standards, you hear a lot of buzzwords, a lot of theories about what web standards are... Here are some most common misconceptions.
1. Web Standards = Validation
Markup and CSS validation has an important role. It can be of great assistance while you're learning, because W3C validator not only points out the errors in your code, you can also learn how to fix them.
However, passing validation alone doesn't mean that you're page is built according to web standards.
I once compared validation and spell checker. If you run this sentence through spell checker
Dog fox brown lazy over jump.
it will find no errors. But does that sentence make sense? No. Similar thing happen to your document when you're not using proper html elements for structuring your markup and not paying attention the the logical flow.
I can't stress enough the importance of semantic markup.
2. Web Standards = CSS
CSS is a style sheet. It is a (powerful) tool that we use to make things look good. And yes, it is very important part of web standards.
But, take a second and look at any table-based markup nightmare of a site and you'll see that they all use CSS in one way or another. Does that make those site web standards compliant?
Technology doesn't make web standards. Even CSS doesn't. It's how you use it.
3. Web Standards = No Tables
When switching over from table based layouts to css based layouts, many developers refuse to use tables in any case. "Tables are evil" they say.
To me, none of the html elements are evil. They were all invented by very smart people and each of those elements has its purpose. HTML tables, for instance, are the best choice if you have to display tabular data, such as calendar...
4. Web Standards = Divs
Overusing divs is something that often happens to people switching from table-based coders to css rookies. I went through that phase myself. What happens is, you simply replace tables with divs and that's it. You end up with the similar complex and unreadable markup as you had before, plus your css file grows several times.
It's not just the container elements that you have to change, it's the entire approach. It's quite a path to walk, but it's the good path :)
5. Web Standards = No IE
The idea of web standards is delivering cross platform and cross browser solutions. In IE's case we need to deliver web standards to non standards compliant browser. But it's our job.
Do yourself a favor and don't ignore IE debugging when developing your site because your client use it for sure. Sooner or later you will have to do it.
Mario Andrade 22 Mar, 2008
Now IE8 is coming and I already tested and at least 4 of the websites I designed don't display correctly.
I put the code on the w3c validator and the only invalid code was flash+dreamweaver code.
Altought it's our job and every website should work correctly on every browser, maybe we should set a limit.
All my clients had IE6 in 2008, i advised them to update. Many problems where solved there.
Bedrich 22 Mar, 2008
If you are feeding each browser a different stylesheet, you may want to revise your CSS. And when you state that your stylesheets are "almost" valid, you are falling under one of the misconceptions this article talks about. Valid code does not equal web standards or proper coding methods. Lastly, your clients upgrading their versions of IE does not fix many of the problems. There is still a big chunk of users browsing the web with IE6 (about 30%).
Steve Firth 22 Mar, 2008
As regards "div soups", I was updating a form page someone else had made. There should have been 7 divs, 10 at the v most. Actual div count 207, I died a little inside.
Matt Basta 22 Mar, 2008
IE8 is beta software. There is still a lot of time before the final product is released.
Where I work, not supporting IE6 will get you fired. I agree that sometimes the functionality is just not what you would want, so graceful degradation is sometimes necessary. It is no excuse to build a website that simply doesn't work properly in IE6, though.
If every one of your clients has IE6, then it isn't your place to have them update. It shouldn't matter how it looks on their end, it should matter how it looks on your clients' clients' ends--something neither you nor your clients can control. No offense, but building a site with this paradigm is simply lazy, cheap, and arrogant.
Ofer Chermesh 22 Mar, 2008
After investing more than a year on developing on our solution we started to receive very good inputs please try Ghotit and I hope you will love it
Harry Roberts 22 Mar, 2008
//Harry
Fabián 22 Mar, 2008
This way you can have beautiful html and css and then fix the IE bugs with say.... JQuery!
suraj naik 23 Mar, 2008
cssglobe 23 Mar, 2008
Dana Lee Ling 24 Mar, 2008
Fahed 24 Mar, 2008
Andrew Assarattanakul 24 Mar, 2008
W3C can only recommends what browser makers should do and how it should behave. But the problem is that they aren't straight forward and clear on how it should be in certain cases and so each browser maker ended up doing their own thing and interpreted them differently.
@Mario: For IE8 submit the rendering bugs to their development team. It is not done and probably isn't anywhere close to the way they want it to be in the end. There are far too many rendering problems and specs missing in their new rendering engine to be considered finished.
Aaron Hildebrandt 24 Mar, 2008
My biggest peeve in web design: people who write invalid code but claim it validates because it's inserted via JavaScript. Okay, that might not be my BIGGEST peeve, but it's up there.
Logan Capaldo 24 Mar, 2008
One possible solution is <span class="Latin">
anon 25 Mar, 2008
Agent 001 25 Mar, 2008
Ravi Rao [MSFT] 25 Mar, 2008
If you have rendering problems and other layout issues with IE, feel free to run them by me, and I'll take a look. My email is ravi@alumni.concordia.ca
We're actively listening to our customers, so please do not hesitate to give us feedback via the IEBlog, or the Beta-1 Newsgroup, or via the Connect Bug database, or any of the various other means.
Thanks.
Malene 25 Mar, 2008
Jermayn Parker 26 Mar, 2008
Dallas Web Designer 1 Apr, 2008
Jitendra vyas 7 Apr, 2008