Are Standards All That Big of a Deal?

[DarkBlood]

Well if somebody does not want to use standards, then why ask in the first place what others say?

Standards are not what make a web page good. It's the person who designs it and what the design looks like that make a web page good as well as the functionality. Standards are not a function of a website, unless the website deals specifically with standards (IE: W3C.)

A post I made on the ubuntu forums, what do you people think?

[TSO]

I agree that standards, aside from those that handle basic page display, are primarily useless. What matters is how a site looks in the end. I have seen some very nice Websites in the past that would have had to drop certain functionalities had the owner insisted on standards compliance. So that's my 2c. :D

[Dynash]

Well using DIVs instead of tables has became a standard, so in that sense, yes. But in others in terms of cleaner code. Not really. If you can understand and can live with messy code, go ahead.

[DarkBlood]

Well using DIVs instead of tables has became a standard, so in that sense, yes. But in others in terms of cleaner code. Not really. If you can understand and can live with messy code, go ahead.

homestarrunner.com doesn't use messy code, but they aren't abiding by standards (Using flash)

[bariteau]

standards will help you reach more people since screenreaders (for blinds) rely a lot on standards compliance and following standards insures cross-compatibility (if the browsers follow the standards themselves).

[TaoPhoenix]

All kinds of topics going on here, so much y'all may not be in the same conversation.
1. "Standards" - generally agreed correct web principles, as mostly laid out by the standards bodies. You can still have a crappy page, but you want it to be YOUR fault that the browser correctly displayed your apalling lack of design skill. You DON'T want to have a site that looks beautiful in Firefox after your hard work only to watch it MELT because Internet Explorer's engine can't be bothered to do it right. This is one of the defining issues of the decade - "Standard vs. Proprietary Lock-In".

2. Disabled Access. You can have an easy to use page/ accessible that happens not to follow web standards because of some feature.

3. Flash
Flash is almost its own standard. When the standards bodies can't quite push through the definitive answer (like HTML5 and Video) then some default "acts as standard".