[niggle]

It's true that we have minimal interest in validation. What's important is that it works for our target audience, W3C valid or not.

Why would you put neat coding ahead of the user's needs?

[funkyprem]

Since when did niggle become a 'Senior Member'?

[niggle]

I hadn't noticed that.

Is it a post count thing?

[funkyprem]

Originally Posted by niggle

Why would you put neat coding ahead of the user's needs?

It's called site performance. When you use what you define as 'neat code', the browser has to do less work to render the page(s). this leads to a faster performing site to the end user.

Personally, I like to think that site performance is one of my users' needs amongst other things and whilst this might not impact you in your world where your sites only need to serve 10 or so people per month, but in my world where i'm dealing with over 500,000 unique visitors per hour it does make a huge difference.

[Dusteh]

'clean code' is also the seperation of style from content. Unless you don't agree with that either niggle?

[funkyprem]

venturewise - to answer your original question I believe the value is currently around 6% of users.

[niggle]

It's called site performance. When you use what you define as 'neat code', the browser has to do less work to render the page(s). this leads to a faster performing site to the end user.

Personally, I like to think that site performance is one of my users' needs amongst other things and whilst this might not impact you in your world where your sites only need to serve 10 or so people per month, but in my world where i'm dealing with over 500,000 unique visitors per hour it does make a huge difference.

Those are good points. But there's always a balance between features and performance - if you really put performance at the top of the list, do you use plain black text on a white background for every site?

Of course not. In every project we trade performance for looks and functionality. It just happens that in my opinion we live in a society where most customers have multi-megabit broadband connections and multi-gigahertz processors, so an obsession with keeping pages to less than 10Kb and wrestling 5% better performance out of a page with days of gruelling work is just a geek fetish and is generally neither cost-effective nor important enough to justify.

[funkyprem]

Originally Posted by niggle

so an obsession with keeping pages to less than 10Kb and wrestling 5% better performance ... neither cost-effective nor important enough to justify.

one page on one site. recoded to reduce page weight by 20kb. this alone equated to £400 per month in saved bandwidth costs. still not worth it?

[weldo]

Originally Posted by funkyprem

venturewise - to answer your original question I believe the value is currently around 6% of users.

I don't think its that high at all ... more like 1% or 2% from stats that i've seen ..

[niggle]

one page on one site. recoded to reduce page weight by 20kb. this alone equated to £400 per month in saved bandwidth costs. still not worth it?

It may well be worth it to you. But that doesn't mean it's worth it to everone on every site, which is why a blanket rule is irrelevant.

[funkyprem]

Originally Posted by niggle

It may well be worth it to you.

not to me, but to my client who is paying these bills, it is worth it.

[niggle]

not to me, but to my client who is paying these bills, it is worth it.

Absolutely - so good job on making sure the client gets what they need. I do the same, but different clients have different needs.

[Hunch]

Originally Posted by niggle

I hadn't noticed that.

Is it a post count thing?

Yes it is. It's automatic if you don't set a custom title.

[cam]

To be honest, it's good to have niggle playing devils advocate here.

It can be too easy to focus solely on technical standards at the expense of time spent on user experience.

[pgo]

Very true, cam. Guilty of that myself sometimes.