Why is valid HTML important to everyone?
The Web works with valid and invalid HTML. So why is valid HTML important? And how does invalid HTML affect everyone who uses the Web?
Why is it important to write HTML to standards?
Technical standards are the bedrock of innovation and it is a recognized fact that smaller companies often lead in the creation of innovative technologies. Standards create a level playing field on which these smaller companies compete with giants. Non-standard use of HTML on the Web thus makes it extremely difficult for smaller companies to compete with their larger competitors, because an enormous amount of their development resources must go to dealing with invalid HTML. The result is that we have less competition, a limited choice of applications, and fewer innovative technologies.
Invalid HTML limits innovation
In 1996, I worked for company that built a standards-compliant Web browser. It took two programmers and a small testing team about a year to build. It had some innovative features and added something new to the browsing experience. By comparison, the Internet Explorer team at the same time comprised 100 people (several years later over 1,000 at cost of $100 million per year). While Microsoft had dedicated developers working on routines to parse/render invalid HTML, smaller companies like the one I worked for could not afford to dedicate a special team of developers to processing invalid HTML. So the non-standard use of HTML created real barriers to competition for smaller companies.
Today, primarily because of non-standard use of HTML, the costs of building a Web browser rendering engine have become so absurd, that even giants like Apple and Google find it too difficult (i.e. too expensive) to build such engines from scratch, and both Safari and Chrome are using a rendering engine that was derived from a third-party software library.
And do you ever wonder why so many WYSIWYG editors suck? Web browsers have it easy; all they have to do is render invalid HTML. But WYSWIYG editors have to render invalid HTML and at the same time must make some kind of sense of it in order to edit it. So how do some smaller companies manage to produce WYSIWYG editors? Most of them use third-party editing controls or libraries that significantly limit the features these WYSIWYG editors offer to users. The company I work for managed to build an innovative WYSIWYG editor from scratch, but at the cost of not accepting invalid HTML.
In the CMS (content management) field, there are lots of smaller vendors, so why does it appear that they are not affected by invalid HTML? The reason is that they treat HTML content as though it's binary data and are therefore unable to offer innovative features that would require them to manipulate the HTML that they manage. For example, take what sounds like a very simple feature to implement - a change of class name in a CSS file managed by a CMS that is automatically propagated to thousands of HTML documents managed by the CMS. In reality this feature is extremely difficult to implement reliably in invalid HTML documents.
Everyone who uses the Web is negatively affected by invalid HTML
Whether you use a Web browser, a WYSIWYG editor, a CMS, a screen reader, a search engine, or HTML email, your Web experience is affected as a consequence of the invalid use of HTML. Enormous amounts of development resources continue to be sapped by the need to deal with invalid HTML; resources that could have been invested in developing new features and making the Web easier to use. Likewise, the limited choice of applications available to you today is in large part a consequence of innovation being stifled in smaller companies that not able to compete with giants, because of the staggering amount of their development costs that is consumed by processing invalid HTML.
When standards are not followed, everyone loses.
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