lord of web standards
For any web designer/developer, validation is one of the key services offered to clients for their websites. Clients want “clean” websites, they want them to look the same in every browser and they want it to be accessible for all their users. This is no bad thing, far from it. With so many browsers for a user to choose from, having a set of standards in place is the only way forward. The downside to this is that the browser developers can choose which standards they adopt and which ones they don’t fancy supporting. (I’m looking at you Microsoft!). This used to be a massive problem in the web development industry. Browsers like Internet Explorer 6 rendered pages so vastly different from it’s rivals that numerous style sheets had to be used for any kind of consistency. To make matters worse IE6 became the most widely used browser on the Internet. Standards were not followed (I mean.. what was the point if the main browser you’re making it for didn’t support them anyway) and developers had to spend many extra hours making sites IE6 compliant..
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