> >Standards are a life thing, not just a web thing:
> >...
> >If you want to play in the big world, you have to use the big standards.
> 
> Hear, hear!

Standards may philosophically be a life thing, but in the context of this list they *are* just a web thing. Tom's TrueGreen site is an example to everyone of a well designed and executed project lifecycle. Having said this, many of us work on much, much larger projects on which we inherit a massive codebase. Every change that is required can either be made by one person in a day or so without standards compliance, or the suggestion can be made to recode the entire site taking 9 man months, after which a testing and stabilisation phase should be gone through. The new site is then launched (with the risks of un-fixed bugs), with the net improvement to the customer being zero. The best you can hope for in the real world is to gradually improve your code snippets' standards compliance in the vain hope that other coders pick up on this and do the same. The system as a whole is not affected, but at least as a developer you can allow yourself a smug sense of self-satisfaction - whi!
ch seemingly is the major motivator for many web developers these days.

Regards

Chris Marsh