le_gber - 8:26 pm on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

I disagree completely.

I knew someone would :).

There is tons of valuable content out there created by people who neither know nor care about web standards.

That's exactly my point. If Google said that standard compliant sites would get a significant boost, guess how long it would take for them to learn about it. How long do you think it would take software vendors to make their latest web design soft 100% standard compliant - if everyone was asking to have them compliant?

value and quality of information in not corelated in any way to the manner in which it is marked up.

Maybe not now, but I think that for equally valuable information, the one marked up properly, accessible and for which the designer showed extra care in the markup, should appear first.

a) accessiblity is very high priorty

and so it should be

b) SEO is not (rankings happened naturally due to depth and breadth of content)

and may be the accessibility focus in a)

c) there are too many people involved with publishing, outside of the central team, with varying levels of skills and enthusiasm to have validation across the board (having been called a nazi for banning font tags!) - you cannot police everyone all the time.

I assume that you use a CMS of some kind for those non techie people. Does it produce standard compliant code out of the box?

d) wide scale change moves at a glacial pace

ok maybe for universities, but for businesses or ecommerce sites I am sure that within 6 months they'd all be standard compliant.