Opera also ran the pages indexed by MAMA through the W3C’s validation tools to see how many conform with standards. The results show that only 4.13 percent are valid.

Ahhh how I love statistics, especially headline grabbing ones like this. It’s a shame they can’t measure the ‘as close to validating as to not make the blindest bit of difference to anything or anyone’ percentage – I think it would be a lot higher, and more representative of the general state of the web today.

As it is I think this particular stat might just get Jeff Croft all wound up again.

The whole concept of web standards, which I once strongly advocated for, has now become so incredibly ridiculous as to be not even worth the time and attention of serious web designers and developers.— Jeff Croft

Jeff was reacting to the techrepublic article where Ian Hickson restated the proposed HTML 5 final recommendation date of 2022. I strongly agree with a lot of what Jeff has to say about web standards; however the problem is that he talks from the perspective of someone who has an excellent knowledge of web standards already. Jeff can knock them down because he has already built them up. The danger is, anyone just starting out in web development, reading Jeff’s comments, may think that the concept of standards is useless – when really the concept is terribly important, it is just the execution that is somewhat flawed.

Whilst web standards and best practice HTML/CSS/JavaScript development are not mutually exclusive, unfortunately in the minds of many developers – especially newer, less experienced ones – they are bound together so closely that they cannot be separated. My fear is that by removing one pillar, the whole house that has been so carefully created from the ashes of the ‘bad old days’ of web development will come tumbling down.

I think any developer who is experienced in web standards should have the right to ignore them and develop to his or her own standard – as long as that is a high one. But newbies must learn the standards first, or with the coming of the next generation the web will be plunged back into the tabled mess of the 90’s.