What you do is to let your clients know the target browsers which you code for and even why.

Jessica, I think you should read about web standards and the history of web standards. Adhering to web standards can be as simple as making sure all opening tags are closed…how could something like that be narrow minded?

Stuart is right, clients are now asking for their sites to be valid xhtml and css and WCAG!

For me it is about clean code, usability and setting myself apart from the web developers who have never even concerned themselves about web standards.

Our take on Web Standards is that they are there to act as a guide as to how your code should be compiled. Using them in this way and working to make sure we achieve this standard will make our websites much less likely to be problematic from browser to browser, and platform to platform – especially when using ‘Strict XHTML‘.

The problem comes when you have followed all the rules and your website still won’t work in IE! You then are faced with working up some specific hacks to make it look and work how it does in the bulk of standards-compliant browsers out there. Sometimes these hacks can make the website fail validation, but if you are worth you’re salt you can find a valid way to write a hack for IE and still pass validation. But the end game of all development is to make sure the finished solution; validates, works in all browsers, and is consistent in design across the board.

You’re right though, some people new to the game might hang their hat on the fact it validates therefore it now works – This isn’t necessarily true in the case of Internet Explorer!

On the wider issue why don’t ‘the big boys’ validate and have industry standard code in play. I think that it’s only a matter of time before valid code becomes a much bigger issue and more of the websites out there that don’t comply will suffer as a consequence. Valid code and Standards Compliant websites are definitely where we are heading, it’s good to get going now as more and more clients we service are starting to ask for this in the early brief stages!

I find the whole web standards thing to be a bit narrow minded to be honest. If you were to look up some of the most popular sites, a good 80% of them don’t validate like Google, YouTube, Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, CNN, and NY Times.

I feel that people should realize that even if your website is coded in these standards, they’re not going to 100% fully work on every browser. I looked at webdesignerwall.com through Browsershots the other day, and some wouldn’t even pick up the images. It could just be the version of the software, but it proves that the standards don’t really hold well.

Anyway, I think it would be better for designs just to focus on making their work look good on latest builds of browsers, operating systems, and screen resolutions. Why make sure it worked on IE 5 when Microsoft don’t even support the OS it was made for anymore?