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Is it worth the development time to output valid HTML?

Asked 2008-09-23T08:01:01.233
13

Developing websites are time-consuming. To improve productivity, I would code a prototype to show to our clients. I don't worry about making the prototype comform to the standard. Most of the time, our clients would approve the prototype and give an unreasonable deadline. I usually end up using the prototype in production (hey, the prototype works. No need to make my job harder.)

I could refactor the code to output valid HTML. But is it worth the effort to output valid HTML?

xhtml strict
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Why not write the prototype in valid (X)HTML in the first place? I've never found that to be more of an effort than using invalid HTML. Producing valid XHTML should be a trivial task. (On the other hand, producing semantically meaningful XHTML might be more taxing.)

In short, I see no advantage whatsoever in using invalid HTML for prototypes.

answered 2008-09-23T10:25:30.683
1

Because, if you stick to standards, your work will be compatible in the future. User Agents will strive for standard compliance and their quirks non-compliance mode will always be subject to change. This is the way is supposed to be.

Unless you're into that whole IE8 broken standards perpetuation thing that they want to enable by default. -- that's another argument.
Webkit, Gecko, Presto? (is that opera's engine?), and the others will always become more compliant with every release.

Unless your html work is in a IE embedded browser control, then there's really no reason to output valid html as long as it renders.

answered 2008-09-23T10:34:53.047

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