Except for us iCAB users. 8^)

Yepp.. All 8 of you.. :P :)

Now I realize that iCAB is a Macintosh only product and that Kevin never recognizes it in his epistles. However it is a very competent little browser and wll parse just about everything. It worked on the
Acid Test from the start. Very laudable from a shop which is essentially a one man operation.

Why should you validate? Because it makes your client appear to be lazy and sloppy if you do not. Of course who’s going to know? No one is going to read your source code.

Except for us iCAB users. 8^)

Oh, yes, it does. XHTML, if served properly, will give nothing but an error if there is a single error in the markup. XHTML is an XML-based language, and therefore must be well-formed. HTML is SGML-based, and gives you much more leeway.

That said, most of my pages don’t validate via the W3C. I follow the standards though, to the point where it is practical. In many cases, you have a choice: meeting your client’s expectations, providing unfettered access to all users, and following the standards. Choose two.

Sorry guys, but strictly following standards is not a must-have. Its a nice-to-have.

If you are going to call your self a developer and develop web pages, you need to know your field and the software the consumers will use to view it.

There is simply no reason for bad or non valid code !

True enough, there will need to be an ability for browser manufacturers to register their proprietary commands to avoid such errors.

I think the developers need to all agree on one standard and stop with all the proprietory browsers

Let’s stop pretending that developers actually have a choice here. Standards are all good, but in the end usability counts. Which usually means different hacks for different browsers. :-/

I think the developers need to all agree on one standard and stop with all the proprietory browsers, each works differently, and nobody has the time to learn to code for several platforms, our code need to be compact and portable – not a hundred lines long to detect the browser and environment and then adapt before it executes the meat of the code.

We seriously need standards laid out for the average programmer to understand the WC3 reads like vcr instructions in my opinion, and at the same time we need browsers that will obey the standards and i hate to say it – block sites that are broken, but provide ‘plain english’ error reporting so they can be fixed easily.

until then i’ll write halfway pages because it takes forever to learn code for 7 browsers.

Why doesn’t someone develop a browser (or an add-on to a browser) that uses a NEW STANDARD? Why is the W3C the authority? Can’t a community put something better to the fore? The HTML standards are OUT OF DATE.