Gordon Weakliem doesn't much care for this post from Joel Spolsky, and points out Mark Pilgrim's take-down of it. The problem is, if Pilgrim read Spolsky's post, he didn't understand any of the words. He has a lot of fun with Spolsky's premise, which is that standards often mean nothing if practice has made it irrelevant - and for good or ill, that is the way it is in HTML and CSS. Where does Pilgrm go? Places like this: (his "translation" of Spolsky's points)

I demand documented standards with open reference implementations. That's why I only develop with Microsoft technologies.

That doesn't address the actual issue though. The reality is, if you want your web page to work with the browsers people actually use, which is more relevant: the supposed standards, or the working reality? Whether you like it or not, real people don't care about the W3C specs, they care about the website they just visited and the content there. Are you interested abstract purity, or making a sale?

Pilgrim (and Weakliem) have picked the former. Most people don't give it a first thought, much less a second.

Technorati Tags: standards, browsers