A few years ago I considered myself somewhat of a web developer, knowing the basic 3 languages (HTML, CSS, JS) and lots of PHP. Moving on from simple text to actual websites was a pain because of the so called "standards" out there, which at the time were ridiculously complicated for me. It pretty much boiled down to this (minus the IE related stuff):
Standards are there to replace old ways of doing things in a simpler way. However when trying to actually implement some of the stuff (Entirely CSS based layout for example), it took me 10x longer to actually do it then if I did the simpler and still working solution. If it rendered the same, then why should I use the more complicated example that takes 10x longer and breaks once you change browsers? This sparked many long religious debates in ##php, ##css, and ##js in Freenode IRC and actually got me banned from ##css because I messed with their little world over there.
My question: Should I follow every single standard and coding conventions even if they take me 10x longer but get me the same result as the simple one?
For the poll tag, those of you who have websites of any size (huge or small), do you follow all the standards?
Best Answer
Product first, then polish.
Get your site/application/game doing what it's supposed to do. Get it up and running, and get people interested.
Then, when you have the time, go back and polish it up. But only because you care, not because anybody else does.
Of course, if the non-compliance issues mean people can't view it, or it's unreadably ugly, or it takes a month to load, or it's hard to maintain, or it crashes the browser, this is a major problem. But it would still be a major problem even if you were standards-compliant.
Ordinary users do not look at the source for a website that isn't loading and go, "Well, it's not displaying the pictures, but it's completely W3C-compliant". They simply browse to another website and never return.
Bottom line, standards are there to make writing browsers easier, and to close up potential security holes. Amazon, Penny-Arcade and Stack Overflow do not make their money from running a standard-compliant website. And unless you're in a website-writing competition, neither will you.