I often find myself in discussions with people who seem to truly believe that web standards somehow have an intrinsic value beyond the idea that they are a starting point for developing an application.

It can be quite a hard argument to make, since I'm not arguing that web standards are a bad thing in themselves, only that trying to support them at the expense of functionality is a mistake because simply supporting a web standard doesn't actually give any benefit in itself.

I was reminded of this argument today by Alex Russell of the Dojo toolkit who said:

Not accepting errors is suicide, and for too long the web standards community has confused validation and correct markup (things that reduce the number of people who can play in the sandbox) with the value created by agreement on how things should behave (things that increase the number of people who can use things that anyone creates).

His succinct way of phrasing that made me think of how I feel when I'm trying to make the same argument and hence the title of this post: I feel like making this argument is tilting at windmills, and yet those same windmills are being run over and swept away by the huge momentum of websites which actually work without any special effort in standard compliance, and by efforts like WHATWG who are following a much more pragmatic approach to standardization.