Jan 24, 2008

W3C: Compliance for the Sake of Compliance

W3C: Compliance for the Sake of Compliance

It's a well-known fact that many popular websites fail W3C validation. There is a brisk discussion on Digg about this subject.

Being valid eats resources and doesn't provide any benefits to visitors. Working in the web development industry I observed that none of the clients are going to pay additionally just to make their websites W3C valid. However, of course, all clients would accept such a gift from a web development contractor.

I think it's better to spend those resources for being useful, interesting and popular. If leading web resources do so then perhaps this approach is reasonable. If they can't afford spending resources for being W3C-valid then smaller websites can't do this all the more.

W3C says that "[...] household-name companies expect people to visit because of the name and in spite of dreadful websites". Are Technorati top-20 blogs dreadful? Is Yahoo! dreadful? I believe you'd rather say "nope" than "yep". W3C is the company with years of tradition so they are just defending their ideology.

Having those W3C compliance badges may work for web development contractors who expose their professionalism that way and willing to give a compliance gift to their clients. But I don't expect W3C compliance to become a de-facto standard.

A couple of links to blog posts on subject:

W3C: Where are the web designers and developers?

Why do we need W3C validation


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