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Comment by andrewtj | Hacker News Reader

In my experience preemptive fixes are akin to procrastination when there's no empirical evidence to necessitate the change.

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We have web standards to prevent browser bugs. Ironically sticking to standards 100 percent of the time often causes buggy visual display in some browsers. Standards are supposed to make things easier but the browsers have been pretty slow in complying. That does not mean that standards are not a good idea.

The lack of empirical evidence is due to that non-compliance. The same browser sometimes allows non-compliant code and chokes on valid code. This is a coordination game (just like driving on the right side of the road). If everyone complies (developers, browsers, etc.) things work. If enough don't, everything breaks.

that's an awesome quote - can I borrow it ??

sure

That assumes that there's extra work in coding to standard. In fact, it's quicker to do so.

Really - adding a doctag is faster than not adding it? That seems incorrect to me.

I think gp is talking about the long-run. That is, getting things to render right on all browsers, on all devices, printed, etc.

Have you ever tried printing a thread? It's bearable, not certainly but pretty.

That's like saying you don't indent your code blocks because hitting tab is slower than not hitting tab.

The point being that there is a lot more to development than keystrokes.

But let's user your argument anyway: what's faster:

<div id="content">content</div>

<table id="content"><tr><td>content</td></tr></table>

Now, lets say I want to move the table text from left to right alignment. While you're mucking around in your code, I pull up the css file and add a line.

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