Are Web Standards Important?

[kev woodman]

Where does everyone stand on Web standards (as set out by the W3C)?

Are they important? Do you stick to them? Do you think using CSS over tables for positioning is a pain in the a**e or do you think using tables is blasphemous?

[paul]

Even the customer does not care about web standards, IMO it is always good to be honest with one's profession to follow the higher standard and to give your clients the best quality work possible. Here are few FAQ relevant to your question; webstandards.org/learn/faq/

[kev woodman]

A man after my own heart

Does it matter if clients don't understand the need for standards? Can't say I know much about the MOT but I'm still happy that my local garage does.

The FAQ is good - I hadn't seen that one before so cheers Paul.

[paul]

Thanks Kev, what I think it is important to educate clients about the benifit of using web standards such as higher SEO ranking, faster downloads, faster redesign etc and definitely that is going to cost little bit higher as quality has some hidden costs.

[Peter]

I agree with Paul, the clients need to be educated about the benefits of using web standards as one of the reasons why a lot of very talented web designers do not create sites which are web standards compliant is due to the time involved and the lack of appreciation received from the client for doing so.

[kev woodman]

I'm not sure time is necessarily the killer with standards-compliance. Maybe you'll take a bit longer with the positioning if you're not that confident with CSS but it shouldn't really take any more time than assembling some horrible mess of nested tables...usually.

The biggest problem I find is that you have to be prepared to compromise a bit on your initial design because you're never going to get the sort of pixel-perfect rendering that you can get with tables. Onthe other hand you get a lot more flexibility and it's much easier to do updates.