[thelist] What does standard compliance actually mean?

[Christian Heilmann]

> To many, standard compliance seem to mean stuff like "semantic web"
> and sometimes even "unobtrusive scripting/graceful degradation". But
> doesen't standard compliance just mean that you follow your declared
> doctype and validate against the w3c validator, not that I
> automaticly write insanely great webpages (from a code view)?
> This may be a bit of a philosophical discussion of course ...
> If anyone could support their views with articles, I'd appreciate it
> greatly :)

This is also an endless discussion, and religious war material.

Especially as the standards in themselves could be seen as guidelines.
We could wax philosophical about what is a standard - a best practice
or a most commonly used method?

My ideas on that:
Standard compliance in the HTML world is writing syntax correct markup
that validates. That way you have a automated testing mechanism and
you can ensure that documents can be parsed and converted easily.

As you can create valid HTML with useless semantics or overly complex
structure, Web Semantics and Graceful Degredation are more
implementation best practises, there is no standard for that.

If you wanted to compare it to writing, then standard compliance is
proper grammar and spelling. Proper semantics would be using the right
tone of language for the current text and graceful degredation would
be the KISS principles of writing (for example writing news for radio
- make sure every sentence deals with only one happening, give the
who, where and what in the first sentence).

Graceful degredation is only partly applicable to other media, as a
text is a text, you cannot make it easier or more complex, whereas you
can improve a web document only for audiences that can deal with the
improvements.