== The devil's advocate argument against paying attention to web standards

The IE team famously doesn't pay too much attention to web standards
like, oh, XHTML (to give one famous example). As it happens, I think
that there's a decent devil's advocate argument for this position ([[as
I've mentioned in passing ChromeAndHTMLFuture]]).

(At this point, I would like to make it utterly plain that I don't
agree with what IE has done in terms of standards. That's why this is a
devil's advocate position.)

The simple way to put it is that many web standards are not great
standards. Exhibit one for this is XHTML itself, which was an
unrealistic boondoggle even before Microsoft refused to implement it,
but XHTML at least has the advantage of being an obviously flawed
standard. Other traditional problems with W3C standards are less obvious
but no less problematic; especially with complex or abstruse standards,
they may well not be clear, complete, or free of contradictions, and
very few standards have a test suite.

Implementing a complex, potentially flawed standard with no test suite
is a recipe for problems. The first rule is that anyone can make
mistakes, which means that your programmers are perfectly capable of
misinterpreting the standard (or coming to a different interpretation
than what other people think is the obvious one). With no test suite,
you have no good way of discovering this divergence from proper behavior
until people start yelling at you for being 'broken'. The larger or more
complex the standard, the higher the chances of this happening to you at
some point. Potential flaws in the standard compound the issue because
now you get to play the 'is this our bug or the standard's bug' game
(and winning this game requires you to become a deep expert on the
standard).

(Effectively you have no good process for finding bugs in your
implementation of the standard, and this guarantees that there will be
such bugs.)

If the web standard is an [[invented standard ../tech/WaysToStandards]],
dreamed up by a bunch of people in a back room somewhere, it's at least
potentially flawed in these ways. Not implementing the 'standard' means
that you don't have to deal with all of this and you're not wasting
your limited time to develop something that people won't care about in
practice.

Hence, if you think that web standards are generally flawed on a
mechanical level and not especially necessary or useful on a general
level, more or less ignoring them until the level of outrage rises high
enough is a perfectly sane reaction. Instead the sensible thing to do
is cherry-pick the clear, easy to implement, and useful pieces of each
standard without necessarily trying to implement the whole thing. This
gets you the useful bits at a relatively low effort, or at least makes
sure that you don't waste too much time coding things that people aren't
going to use.