Of all the crazy things I have read, today’s post at Forever Geek just about made me fall out of my chair. Of 15 well known companies ran through the the W3C standards validator only 2 had 0 errors and those two were Microsoft and MSN. Now you see why it nearly knocked me on the ground.
I look at it this way if Microsoft thinks enough of the web standards to incorporate them into their websites, why don’t they value them enough to have their browser support more of them? Before everyone jumps down my throat and tries to stake me up, hear me out. I know the new Internet Explorer 7 is going to support a greater number of the web standards. Yet I know they are only doing that because of the pressure from influencial Web Designers, Developers, Activists, and of course competing companies like Fire Fox*. I guess that is what suprised me the most about their sites being ’standardized’. Ohh well, enjoy this article and try a few of the sites you visit often and see how they fair according to W3C.
Read: Microsoft The Only Ones Following Web Standards
* I know that Fire Fox didn’t pass the Acid test either, but I am sure most designers would agree that Fire Fox supports far more standards than IE.
Till then… Stay Focused
Dec 22
December 27th, 2005 at 2:22 pm
It certainly supports the arguement that almost nobody really cares about standards.
December 27th, 2005 at 4:21 pm
It would lend credance to support a ‘notion’ that some people do not care about standards, however you have to admit that it is funny that Microsoft is one of those that does care about standards. Which would lend more weight to the ‘notion’ that the majority of the ‘right’ people DO care about standards.
December 28th, 2005 at 8:09 am
Since when is 2 out of 15 “majority”?
December 28th, 2005 at 8:38 am
This is not surprising to me at all that Microsoft is in the push for this. The MSN homepage has been strict XHTML for more than 2 years and I am unsure how long the homepage for microsoft.com has been this way. Microsoft has been working this into their products for quite sometime and the effort is now starting to show reward. ASP.NET 2.0 is XHTML compliant and IE7 will support the most of the current web standards as well. The technologies that Microsoft develops have become deeply rooted in businesses, so rapidly developing a “standards fix” would be irresponsible in the sense that it could be detrimental to a myriad of other technologies that incorporate the base technology. It is a very big ship to turn and you want an immediate fix. IE6 has been around now for about 5 years and if I had built an application that incorporated the technology from the IE core and MS changed it simply to be “standards compliant” and the result caused me to lose a lot of money in fixing it, I would be livid.
Animated movies like Toy Story take 3-5 years to develop and software is no different when it comes to unit testing and regression testing on top of development time.
December 28th, 2005 at 9:02 am
@Bill - the majority that I was refering to was not in the sites, but in the designers. If standards really were not as important as everyone wants to believe then why would major companies like Microsoft even think about being standards compliant?
@Grant - I too would be livid if a companies technology changed such that it would casue some core features to go away. IE6 is 5 years old, and that is where the problem is. That is the irony. I agree with that software testing requires time and does require testing and of course development time. No one is expecting things to change overnight and I am not personally bashing one technology over another, I was merely pointing out the irony of blog I read where Microsoft was the one that was compliant.
December 28th, 2005 at 9:58 am
Exactly what I was saying. If the designers of websites were really as concerned about standards as you profess, then the compliance would “accidentally” be higher than 2 in 15. It isn’t. The only reason that Microsoft was compliant is that as the most scrutinized, they have to be. The real question is, of the 15 tested, do Microsoft’s sites provide the visitor with the highest quality experience?
December 28th, 2005 at 1:45 pm
Just because a site doesn’t have to be adhere to standards doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. Standards are a guide, standards are there to help with forward compatability. You can acheive a high quality experience with a standards complaint site.
I should a point out that most sites that do not validate in that method are made with standards, but some of the programming behind them outputs code which is not standards compliant. So as the standards become more of the norm (which we can already see happening) these anomalies will become less and less. Even the average Joe designer who uses web design software will have clean code inputed while they work. WYSIWYG editors have already updated their code engines to do this.
The real question is how long will it take for scripts and core programs to be updated to output clean and validated code?
December 29th, 2005 at 8:13 am
Again we circle back to you telling me that standards compliance is important to a “majority” and “we can already see that becoming the norm.” The study does not support your claim. Unless the compliance test results were 0 of 15 last time around. The fact remains that all but a very, very few websites in the vast reaches of the universe are not compliant [including this one]. More importantly, these websites have millions of visitors that never even consider standards. To the average visitor, a well thought out layout and intuitive navigation is more appreciated than a strict adhereance to a standard. Will designers in pusuit of pleasing the standards police sacrifice innovation. As you look around the world. The greatest acheivements came from people willing to break away from standards. What if the designs of the Wright brothers were limited to the standards of travel at that time. wait you are going to tell me that the thousands who have died in plane crashes would still be alive today…
December 29th, 2005 at 8:16 am
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
- George Bernard Shaw