The Standards Police will get you!

Oh the irony - it appears that the Standards Police have caught up with me. Three words for you, Charl: validation isn't everything. Considering three of my websites were involved in your local standard-compliancy study (this one, the V&A Waterfront and the Cape Town BIG 6), I feel I should say something - or rather, point you to something that's already been said.

"It doesn’t help anyone, we’re all aware of our defficiencies [sic], and could probably point 100 more out on top of the 10 you point out. Not only that, but you have no idea what kind of conditions we’re working in, or what else we’re trying to do (or the fact that we’re building a whole new standards compliant, CSS based site behind the scenes, but Rome wasn’t built in a day…at least it wasn’t built properly in a day)."

- more at The Standards Police will get you! by Brian D. Garside.

And my own two cents. Running a website through validation tools and then complaining that they're not standard-compliant is like failing a student in an exam for using green ink.

All of my sites are standard compliant. They might not meet all the validator requirements (due to a few markup errors) but they still work. They're usable, they're accessible, and they're cross-browser/platform compatible. Furthermore I consider the V&A Waterfront project, designed in 2002, as the first major corporate South African website to adopt a standard-compliant design.