How much do you strive for standards?

Standards are important, but sometimes the standards way gets in the way of the quick solution. How much emphasiz do you want to put on standards compliance in your project? It would be interesting to know, and then to know your motivation...

If it’s my personal project I try to achieve full standards compliance (XHTML, CSS, PHP, accessibility, usuability).

I work on several projects and try to do that too, but most of the customers want something in "that" or the "other" way no matter if it meets the standards or not. This is why I have not selected the last poll item...

Boby

Just trying to figure out where people are. There’s so much talk about standards compliance everywhere. I think standards are good. I however often find that I spend three times as long placing say divs that I would creating a table. And since people pay me by the hour...

If you are going to do it, why not do it right? I think it is important to note that standards compliance means accessable, and accessable to everyone regardless of disabilaties, location, ability to afford current technology, etc... It is nice to make sure that everyone visiting your site should be able to have a similar experience.

-sD-

I’d lean toward full compliance, but I answered "I try to achieve compliance, except in particular circumstances", because I also believe you can’t systematically achieve full compliance (at least, when clients have particular demands and can’t be convinced of alternatives => never happened to me so far but you never know).

Also, I believe in Pareto’s Law. Sometimes achieving compliance will mean that reaching 100% compliance will add 80% more work and the question is : is it efficient ? Sometimes you’re just not paid enough to meet this particular goal, and there are factors which can ruin you pretty efforts nice and easy : namely, WYSIWYG editors !!! Once your client starts editing his content with them, you compliance is flushed down the toilets !

This being said, when you control all the parameters (personnal website for instance) you should strive for full compliance. Like Scotty says, why not do it right ?

I agree with David

:D

I had a lovely validated site, then the client wanted some changes like yesterday that totally broke in IE, so I gave it up and switched to a table layout and HTML 4 doctype. <sigh> Bottom line trumps principles every time.

Tables are standards too....

Actually, I readily admit that my interests lie elsewhere than coding, and that makes me a lazy one. I’m not a webdesigner - I just happen to supply content to websites. And since my client knows this they think I’m a website guru. So, they call me and tell me: do this, and do this yesterday!

I’m not good with CSS. If I want a three column layout, I don’t seem capable of aligning the columns nicely with divs. So I use tables. I tell myself: Tables are standards too. Perhaps I lie to myself.

Tables are for what they are ment to be...display a table with information. Simmilar to Excell.
The table layout is just a hack but a good one for incompatible browsers like IE. I know it’s really hard to align DIVs horizontally and more harder to have them do so in older browsers. You can also find a lot of ready to use CSS tricks for 3-column or more templates with DIVs.

Here are some nice 2,3,4 columns techniques to style with CSS:
http://glish.com/css/
http://www.456bereastreet.com/lab/equal_height_ii/
More to find here:
http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ThreeColumnLayouts

If you plan to redesign on a later point this can save you a lot of effort and time, specially when you have a huge page with many files. You will probably find it much easyer to change a CSS file than all HTML markup full of tables.

Boby