Tales of a Designer

Web Standards Should Always Matter

I wouldn’t consider myself a hard core web standards advocate, as far as preaching the word every chance I get. I more or less just try and educate people if they are curious and ask me about it. However, when I am actually designing and developing for the web, I try my hardest to conform to these standards.

For some reason, web standards has been on my mind all day, probably from reading two different posts that give attention to the subject. If you don’t happen to visit those links, the first one is titled ‘Web Standards Don’t Matter (As much as you think).’ Now, though I thought it was an interesting post, and some valid points are made, and he doesn’t condone bad practices, I will have to disagree with the overall message. This isn’t an attempt to bash an article, it just made me think about some things, that go way beyond that article.

Of course users are still presented with their proper content if the site isn’t 100% valid, however, I don’t think that we should settle for this type of thinking. When developing for the web, you should always try to go as far as you possibly can to stay in the realms of standards. Yes, your users don’t care about this semantic markup, however, it’s also not their job to care. But it is our job as designers/developers to make the best possible site while still trying hard to abide by these standards.

With any type of movement (maybe not the right word), you should always set standards to how things should be done right. If not, things happen, like web design in all of the 90’s! Take cars for example. You hear about recalls all the time, and many times, it’s things that the drivers don’t even notice, and are harmless. The car still works. But, it wasn’t built properly. You wouldn’t want these manufacturers to go on building these cars thinking “Standards Don’t Matter.”

So, I guess my point is that it’s not that you have to be obsessive about being 100% semantic in your markup for a site, however you should always shoot to get as close to 100% as possible. Whether your users know it or not, web standards always matter, and we can’t create a better [overall] web unless we aim to to develop as close to the standards as possible.