However, I still see that web standards play an important role, especially in this particular case study. It’s true that we could follow standards AND still use tables and still have the performance issues.

But the point I’m trying to make is that web standards is the right place to start, if you experience rendering problems like we had. Standards define how browsers should work. If you use non-standards code, the browser vendors for themselves decise how things will work (and that can easily lead to rendering bugs and differences on different browsers)

With 10,000 different browser versions already existing today, I think the alternative is hard to manage: I have no chance in life to know all the browser oddities and behaviours if I for example put a <form> element directly inside a <table> element. Some browsers may neglect to know about the form? I don’t know, because browser vendors can decide for themselves how they want it to work. It’s unspecified.

In this particular case, we had 15,706 errors and warnings, and it was likely that some of them had an influence on the rendering engine that caused the bug we were chasing.

In my opinion, Web standards are the first step to code that’s cleaner, better, slimmer, performs better, less susceptible to browser bugs. In your own words: Minimal markup.

One more reason why I start with webstandards: If you run into browser bugs, they’re usually corrected with newer versions of the browsers. (I’ve previously reported about a bug in IE and another one in Firefox).

Browsers are coded today with the purpose to support the web standards (no exception!). So if non-standard code works in browsers now, it may stop working the way you intended in later browser versions.

Also the case I’m describing here is what worked for us, and starting with eliminating the 15,706 errors and warnings was fairly easy. Besides from the performance issue, we got several further advantages, as I described in the article. Decide for yourself what works for you.

The mere adherence to web standards does nothing to guarantee performance improvements. If you’d called the post “Why writing minimal markup matters,” then I’d say you’ve got a point. Please do point out why I’m wrong – I want to learn this stuff, but I’m struggling right now.

Thanks. :)