question about W3C standards and most web sites

[steve2470]

http://www.w3.org/standards/

The W3C promotes itself as the website standards bearer. Sincere question, why don't more websites try to comply with its standards ? Is it because of Internet Explorer ? Thanks for your time.

Steve

[DaveJ]

1. Bad developers

A vendor of ours serves up pages in an automated fashion, placing body, CSS tags, and all sort of other elements in every conceivable part of the pages. I think much of it is because they are using an older development environment, and since development time is so slow in those old environments, like 10 times slower, they then feel rushed and throw things together any which way that works. More modern development environments should not allow the developer to be so sloppy and they are an ease to use.

Browsers allow a lot of noncompliant code so that bad programmers' code will still work, in addition to backward compatibility, special features, etc.

Anyway, the problem stems from inexperienced and/or mentally incompetent developers who are hired by managers who have no skill, and therefore cannot discern good developers from the bad ones. Often they refuse to move on and get more up to date development environments because they have established themselves via an old slow system, so they are stubborn at the expense of others. Often they made a bad decision 5 years ago and perpetually refuse to admit they made a mistake and seek out better options.