[LazyJim]

...continued...

Originally Posted by jjmac

Web standards are actually less complex. The problem comes in because people are used to doing things the way they've always done them. If a person who has never coded before had a class over doing it the old way, and one over doing it standards compliant, they would surley choose the standards compliant way because it is SO much easier.

To prove this, go to a page which is layed out with tables and doesnt care about standars compliance and view the source. Try to follow it. Now go to my portfolio page and view the source. See the difference? Standards compliant code is MUCH easier not only to write, but to read by other people and by web technologies.

Originally Posted by GeorgeB

Everyone in this thread kinda glossed over the blazingly obvious irony that if you do a google search on a few high paying competitive keywords I've got $$ that says the majority of the top resulting pages wont validate.... Until you can explain that away the whole valid code = better serps argument wont fly with me.

Not to mention what was also mentioned in this thread. The serps sites themselves dont even validate!

Would like to hear thoughts on that as well.

Originally Posted by jjmac

This is a relativly easy question. Standards based coding is relatively new. It takes any person no matter what profession a while to learn new technologies that evolve. It is much easier to write a new standards based page from scratch than it is to convert an non-standards compliant page to standards. In my particular case, every page that I wrote before I learned to code with standards, do not validate. Every page I wrote after do validate. I constantly have web designs that I'm working on and I don't have time to convert the old ones at the momment -- and the clients don't always want to pay to have the page updated due highly to the mentality that is spreading here. I'm sure plenty of other designers fall into the same category I do.

What I don't like about this argument is that one of the basis for arguing is "I can't see a difference, so there must not be one."

Who would complain if someone invented a better concrete that was stronger and cheaper? Everyone can understand that. The buildings would look the same still, but I doubt you'd hear the same argument you hear in this thread.

This is because too many people don't understand the technicalties behind the benefits of valid code. These people probably don't understand the full weight of these things. Here's just a few:

Valid code is based on XML-like technology, and can actually use XML now. Did you know that the new file system MS puts out will be based on XML? Think of the data integration, files on your system could be a web page just as easily as they could be secure. All data systems are integrating with XML now, think of the possibilities of searching data, MUCH more accurate results in much less time. I'd say this alone fits the "stronger, harder concrete" argument, but lets look at some more.

Seperating design from content. There's an idea! Standards compliant page does this. What does this mean? It means that my content can show up however I want on any medium, regardless of how it's coded. I can have my page show up a certain way on a monitor, but when the page is printed it looks completely different, such as removing the bulky internet headers and menu's to where all you have is plain, readable text. The content can be styled for devices such as cell phones and PDA's with no extra overhead to the server or the web page. There many many devices that can recieve custom layout information all for the simple fact that the design is seperated from the content. I do this on many pages now, especially for print and PDA.

And of course there is the accessibility advantages. People on specialized equipment such as computers with accessibility options turned on for people with problems seeing, can customize the content however THEY need it, not how the designer feels they need it. Complete control is given to the end-user and not some designer with tripple 26 inch monitors (oh yeah, i've got 3...lol) You can actually go to any standards compliant page and create your own style for that page if you have the gumption to do so, and make the page look however you want.

Think of the possibilites! Filters for children that automatically restrict all adult content while rendering the rest of the page, colorblind templates to change colors that could possibly be a problem to better combinations, search engines that pull all relavant information from thousands of different pages to customize a page specifically for one search result, anything is possible.

Is it feeling harder and stronger now? There's even more technicalities I can get into, but believe me valid code is worth it.

I do appreciate the fact that you're not just agreeing with developers without knowing why. But you really do need to do some homework before using the "I can't see it so it's not there" argument.

Originally Posted by GeorgeB

"I can't see it so it's not there"

When/where did I say something to that affect?

But just to be argumentative I'll counter with this... sometimes when you can't see something, it's because it's not there.