OK I am gonna give the dead horse a last kick then. Sorry. My own feeling is that programming tends to attract a particular kind of personality mix, what it comes down to, if you watch "Big Bang Theory", would you rather have Sheldon or Leonard program your website? Sheldon will worship at the altar of standards, but his site will suck. The last time I heard standards proselytized with such fervor, was when the EDP manager was railing against the insubordinate behavior of our laboratory managers, who had the audacity to order personal computers that were not conformant to the IBM PC standard. As he mumbled incantations and cast spells, we caught catch-phrases like "future compatibility with the 4341 mainframe". Well we all know what happened to him. I can still remember the crane swinging the big iron out of the fourth floor windows one sunny afternoon in June. Future compatibility is pie in the sky. If things get broke later you can fix them later, just like you fix them today. And rest assured they will get broke, regardless of any ante bets you want to lay on the standards table. The purpose of standards is to share markets, not to "create excellence". Just bear in mind that if you validate your code against xhtml, and serve it as text/html, then you are hacking the browser.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kent Parker Sent: Thursday, 18 March 2010 9:11 a.m. To: NZ PHP Users Group Subject: [phpug] Re: web programming and development services or consultation Heh, that's all very well, Richard, but you tell that to Bill Gates and the lads at Microsoft. What's the point of 100% html validation when the main player doesn't follow the standards? Surely html validation is just icing on the cake which might be compulsory for those people whose charge out rate is greater than $100 but for the rest of us is just another tool to get a site to be as good as it can be. The last time I validated a site the errors were for using a number to start an id name for a tag, and failure to meet other similar minor bureaucratic rules like that. None of these kinds of things are ever going to cause a site to break in the future any more than IE6, 7, 8 and 9 will cause a site to break now. Having said that, I think the original poster needs to get down from his 'tall poppy' and learn some marketing skills. I think that was probably initially more offensive than the validation errors on his site which are minor. On Mar 18, 1:19 am, Richard Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > So, I was going to respond to this conversation earlier, but something > didn't really feel right about the way it was all going so I left it. > > Aaron, Harvey and others present a compelling argument. We know that > every project is constrained by a limited set of resources, and it is > the ability to juggle those resources to match business needs that is > part of what makes a good professional programmer. In this way, > arguments about limited ROI and simply having more important things to > do dominate the discussion and lead to people thinking HTML validation > is a nice-to-have that doesn't really matter. > > What finally popped up in my mind - inconveniently moments before I > was going to bed, as usual - was that we're simply aiming too low. > > "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." > > The risk we run, when we regularly aim for merely Good, is that we > become someone who cannot ever deliver Great. This applies to > everything, not just HTML validation or even programming. A > fundamental aspect of greatness is attention to detail. The difference > between the house designed by a good architect, and the one done by a > great architect, is not in the size or the shape or how pretty it > looks. It's in the myriad of different tiny ways it helps the people > who live in it achieve their goals. > > For a web application, HTML validation is part of that. Precise, well > formed HTML is easier to maintain, easier to debug and easier to use > for numerous situations from screen readers to screen scrapers. Every > app should have perfect HTML validation as a goal. It should almost > never be the highest priority (maybe if you're doing w3c.org or > something), but it should be there in the task list because without > it, and without comprehensive unit tests and lint checking and code > documentation and every other little element, it can never be great. > > The real world imposes limits on us, a number of these tasks, and > others, may never be realised in a given project, but if you start day > one of the project saying "Reality sucks, lets aim low" then you've > already sold yourself - and your client - short. You'll never deliver > a great project that way. > > The next time you start a project, don't compromise on the vision and > don't forget the little details. Make sure you put the priorities > where they should be - this is not an excuse to mess up delivering the > value the business needs - but add the tasks in anyway, even if > they're at the bottom of the list. > > Every project you do should be your best project yet. Every project > you do should exceed your own expectations. When you put these tasks > in your task list you are saying "I'll get there, I'm so good at this > that I will get to the point where nothing would make this project > better than having 100% valid HTML everywhere". > > The world will never have enough great programmers. We need you. Don't > sell yourself short. > > Regards, > Richard. -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.791 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/2751 - Release Date: 03/17/10 08:33:00 -- NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]
