[thelist] RE: The need for IE-only sites?

[Diane Soini]

I find this thread (The need for IE-only sites?) interesting if only 
because I'm having a bummer day, feeling that the attitude really is 
"standards? who cares?" Why:
1. My job. Standards, who cares. That's the attitude. So what it only 
works in IE. We don't care. Bloated code? Who cares. It's pretty and 
looks the same in Netscape 4 and that's all that matters. (yeah, 
conflicting, but both attitudes prevail.)
2. I'm looking for a new job. Same attitude: Standards? Who cares? We 
already tested the site and found it downloads quick enough. Bandwidth 
is not an issue. It looks pretty. Standards are not important.
3. Intralearn. The company just bought it and I cannot believe the lack 
of QA that went in to the front end development. One page I counted 
something like 7 iterations of the title tag and the meta content type 
tag. What kind of shoddy back end programming created that devil's 
spawn? Another page had two complete html documents--doctypes, html, 
head, body tags and everthing, one nested within another. Did anybody 
care that the product produces such crappy front end code? Does the 
front end code reflect at all on the back end code? Meanwhile, do you 
have an idea how difficult it is to customize the look and feel of a 
site with such crappy code? You can't predict at all how your css will 
behave. Ooh I'm so excited! I can customize the look and feel! Or can 
I? And joy of joys! I get to face a future of endlessly applying font 
tags and bloated nested tables, spacer images, frames and out-right 
invalid code forever, cheerfully looking the other way.

C'mon guys. Let's get really truly honest about this. Does it really 
matter? I mean REALLY? Do web standards actually, really truly matter? 
I want to believe. I believe they should matter. I've even got 
Zeldman's book right here. I'm a believer. But DO standards ACTUALLY 
matter? Maybe they really don't. In the real world, when we look up 
from our favorite web logs and turn away from our rarified, ivory tower 
web worker world, there's nearly no valid, standards-compliant code out 
there and nobody cares.

But, if standards actually do matter, how on earth do I find that job? 
Where is it?

OK. I'm really gonna send this.
Diane