Gabriele Romanato wrote: > I've just finished to validate the markup and the CSS of the sites of > Obama and McCain. The results are horrible: thousands errors! While I'm > listening to "Fade to black" (Metallica), I'm just wondering why the > standard are neglected in such a way. > do you have an answer that could save my trust in a better web? > > Standards are there to make our working together easier and handovers or working with third parties less painful. They are an agreement between developers how to work together.
For web standards it also *should* mean that your development process has predictable outcomes as the browser vendors adhere to these standards. In the past this was not the case, which had positives and negatives (we would not have Ajax had Microsoft not violated the ecmascript standard and enhanced on it). Now it is more and more and even IE in its 8th permutation is a great, standards compliant browser. Where it goes pear-shaped is that end users (and especially IT departments who are the only ones that can upgrade software in a lot of companies) do not upgrade browsers as browsers aren't seen as something that needs maintenance but comes with the operating system. This is why to have the largest reach some people consider it needed that we don't follow standards but test with all browsers over and over again. An election campaign site is not meant to be forever, so I guess they wanted to make it work now. For non-temporary sites this is not a safe way of thinking as it is short-sighted and you'll have to re-evaluate whenever a new browser comes around. A more mature and safer way of thinking browser support whilst following standards is a graded support, as explained for example here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
