Does anyone pay attention to standards?

Hi everyone,

Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
surprise none of them passed.

Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
guidlines for web design?

Isaac

Are you losing $14,200.00 per year without your knowledge?
http://bigmoneyandfreetime.web1000.com

Isaac Grover

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (Isaac Grover)
writing in news::

> Hi everyone,
>
> Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at
> the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds.
> Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the
> W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.
>
> Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
> at as guidlines for web design?
>

In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to better
results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are machines, have
no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look for logical, valid
markup.

--
Adrienne Boswell
Please respond to the group so others can share
http://www.arbpen.com

Adrienne

Isaac Grover wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
> Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
> some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
> surprise none of them passed.
>
> Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
> guidlines for web design?

Hehehe. Where have you been these last couple years, it's such an old topic!

W3C-compliant code is actually gaining popularity, due to some solid
promotional work by the W3C and other organisations, and due to the fact
that browsers are finally catching up with the standards.

But there are still a lot of people that seem to take pride in coding to
individual browser bugs instead of coding to reliable, stable standards.
I have no idea why they do that, there's no benefit to it (except that
they can make their clients pay for "updates" to "fix" the code when it
no longer works).

Here's a couple links about the benefits of web standards:

The Business Value of Web Standards
<http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000266.php>

What are the advantages of using web standards?
<http://webstandards.org/learn/faq/#p3>

The Business Benefits of Web Standards
<http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/why-web-standards/>

The benefits of Web Standards to your visitors, your clients and you!
<http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/benefits/>



Matthias

Matthias Gutfeldt

Isaac Grover wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages
> at the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to
> shreds. Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com,
> etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.
>
> Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
> at as guidlines for web design?

Are you asking what people actually do, or what they should do? The answer are
probably different!

See:
http://www.ub.uib.no/elpub/2001/h/413001/
It describes some 2001 research using a robot to validate many pages found on
the web. Fewer than 1% validated as they were. If a Transitional DOCTYPE was
assumed for those without a DOCTYPE, the proportion was still less than 3%.
The paper (125 pages) categorises the problems.

I think the websites of members of W3C have similar issues. But I believe the
proportion that validate rises year by year.

I validate my pages, but more as a check of whether I am getting things right
than in the expectation that it will make a lot of difference to my audience.
They are almost certainly using browsers that can tolerate invalidate pages,
because of the above. (I use Dreamweaver, which reduces the number of possible
errors).

--
Barry Pearson
http://www.Barry.Pearson.name/photography/
http://www.BirdsAndAnimals.info/
http://www.ChildSupportAnalysis.co.uk/

Barry Pearson

Isaac Grover wrote:

>
> Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages
> at the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to
> shreds. Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com,
> etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.
>
> Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
> at as guidlines for web design?
>

"Anymore"? Who ever cared for web standards? Aside from some HTML
freaks like us. In any case, if you don't do it out of selfishness
(e.g. to better maintain your sources), don't do it at all. If
Microsoft gets it wrong, don't follow unless you feel it saves your
time to have crappy HTML. Most websites do, you are correct.

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

Philipp Lenssen

Adrienne wrote:

> Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (Isaac
> Grover) writing in news::
>

>
> In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to
> better results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are
> machines, have no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look
> for logical, valid markup.

No search engine would ever care for valid markup.
This is not to say totally broken links are helpful.
Accessibility, especially the what-to-do-with-blind-people or
what-to-do-with-javascript-disabled-browsers approaches help SEs a lot.

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

Philipp Lenssen

Adrienne wrote:

> Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (Isaac Grover)
> writing in news::
>
>
>>Hi everyone,
>>
>>Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at
>>the W3 Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds.
>>Then I pointed some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the
>>W3 Validator; to my surprise none of them passed.
>>
>>Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked
>>at as guidlines for web design?
>>
>
>
> In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code leads to better
> results in search engines. Why? Because search engines are machines, have
> no eyes, no ears, hands, etc., so they have to look for logical, valid
> markup.
>

Search engines usually index whatever their robots send back to them.
The engines themselves don't look for anything.

'Later
Peter

--
Peter aka Ulujain - Computing for Fun!
http://www.ulujain.org/

Ulujain

Isaac Grover schrieb:

> Hi everyone,
>
> Just out of curiosity I recently pointed one of my hand-typed pages at the W3
> Validator, and my hand-typed code was just ripped to shreds. Then I pointed
> some major sites (microsoft.com, cnn.com, etc.) at the W3 Validator; to my
> surprise none of them passed.
>
> Doesn't anyone care anymore, or are the standards more-or-less looked at as
> guidlines for web design?

Some weeks ago someone noticed that my pages are not valid, so I looked
it up and checked what is to be done. As I use a "standard frane"
programmed by php, I made this valid, and so _all_ my pages are valid.

Maybe that here ore there is something wrong, but if you find it I will
repair it

Werner


--
-----------------------------------------------------------
Werner Partner * Tel +49 2366 886606 * Fax: 886608
private.php?do=newpm&u= * http://www.sonoptikon.de
hören Sie Klassik: http://www.drmk.ch/

Werner Partner

Adrienne wrote:
>
> In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code
> leads to better results in search engines.

That has certainly not been my experience. I did a new site for a
restaurant, using valid html 4.01 strict. It shows up 4th in Google for
"TS McHugh's" at the moment (it's been bouncing around a lot lately).
The old site is # 1 at the moment. It has dreadful markup like the
following for its header:

<td width="260" valign="top"><strong><font face="Times New Roman"
color="#FFFFCC"><big><em><big>T.S.McHugh's</big></em></big></font><font
face="Verdana"><small><small>

The new site is not new. It's been up since October.

In Yahoo, the new site doesn't show up on any of the 4 result pages.
Ditto for Lycos, HotBot, and Webcrawler.

I'm afraid better better markup doesn't necessarily lead to better
search results. What should get good results[1] is text content that can
be indexed and inbound links.

[1]I say "should" because even that hasn't helped in my case. Google
reports a handful of inbound links for the new site, while, for the old
site, it reports none. And that's been the case for several weeks.

--
Brian (remove "invalid" from my address to email me)
http://www.tsmchughs.com/

Brian

Brian wrote:

> Adrienne wrote:
>>
>> In my experience, clean markup, clean CSS and clean code
>> leads to better results in search engines.
>
> That has certainly not been my experience. I did a new site for a
> restaurant, using valid html 4.01 strict. It shows up 4th in Google for
> "TS McHugh's" at the moment (it's been bouncing around a lot lately).
> The old site is # 1 at the moment. It has dreadful markup like the
> following for its header:

<snip>

....as a counter-example, my relatively new page:

http://tranchant.plus.com/notes/multiviews

comes up second behind apache.org in a global Google search for
"multiviews", top for "php multiviews" and top on a UK search for
"multiviews". The page is only 9 days old.

So there's certainly no *disadvantage* to using decent markup, and there
seems to be no substitute for text content.

--
Mark.
http://tranchant.plus.com/

Mark Tranchant