HTML & CSS: The Good Parts

Taking the Middle Road: Standards-Friendliness

Even when work product can’t stand up perfectly to the test of validation, the good intentions that underlie web standards remain relevant.

The primary goal of standards-friendliness is to allow iterative enhancement of work product, a significant aspect of which is forward compatibility. Standards-friendliness leads to syntactically correct markup in good source order that strictly enforces separation of structure from presentation, while minimizing the amount of time spent struggling with the minutiae of validation. While this practice concedes more to adverse circumstances than many web standards advocates feel is appropriate—since after all, the project sponsor is the one who signs the paychecks—it still yields many benefits.

Benefits of Standards-Friendliness

What do you get in return for the extra effort of a standards-friendly approach?

Standards-friendly deliverables follow the Pareto (80/20) Rule, creating optimal benefit for the amount of time invested

The alternatives are unmaintainable assets, lack of scalability, and inflexibility. Such outcomes increase delivery times over the long term, since there’s little in standards-ignorant work product on which to base modular assets.

Accessible assets become much easier to create

When the source order of content is easily human-readable and developers use appropriate elements—especially lists, in the case of navigation functionality—the result presents few if any challenges for users ...