Should you redesign your site for Firefox?

Just for fun, I ran the Enterprise page through the W3C validator.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.entrepreneur.co...

"Result: Failed validation, 178 errors"

Maybe a redesign to W3C standards is in order?

At least I was able to read the entire article without having to copy and paste elsewhere. I've had to do that with some horribly miscoded web pages.

There seems to be a lot of "web designers" who make a page or site look good on the client's machine, then grab their pay and run before the client finds out it only looks good for that exact setup.

Coding to standards makes sense. Coding to a particular browser is dumb. Coding around some particular browser's quirks makes sense so long as you don't code contrary to standards in the workaround. This is especially true for a business, where you want the widest possible audience. A standards compliant foundation ensures this.

I'm not sure what the current status is, but a year ago or so I and others pointed out to the spreadfirefox guys that their site was similarly noncompliant. The response was that while it was true that it was not compliant, there were more pressing issues that were more important. They made it clear that the main purpose of the Spreadfirefox site was to promote the spreading of Firefox and that it was important to focus on that and not get sidetracked making the site standards compliant and besides we do all this in our spare time.

I found that experience to be... depressing. Even to the spreadfirefox guys, the idea of standards compliance was not of real importance as anything but a sales pitch. SFX members were, of course, encouraged to highlight standards compliance as a selling point. Then again, IIRC, certain portions of the spreadfirefox site did not render properly in firefox at the time.

That _is_ depressing. It should have been a showcase for standards compliance instead of an embarassment.