Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

I do sympathise with your position, in that it should be an advantage to follow standards, and browser compatibility now and in the future should be practically guaranteed by doing so. The world would be a better place if this were the reality. But it isn't, and so pragmatically, I'd rather build web sites and apps that work than sites and apps that dogmatically tick the right boxes even though it requires more effort and offers no demonstrable benefit.

You grow hair on your palms and...nowait, that was...you know what, nevermind.

Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

An example of useful standardisation would have been all browsers using the same default stylesheet. Imagine how much developer time could have been saved and how many glitches could have been avoided over the years if we had never needed things like CSS resets or Normalize.

But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise. The only downside to not following those standards is that someone can complain you're not following their preferred standards. And someone always will, but unless it really does matter (for example, because it excludes customers and damages your bottom line, or it actually does undermine some sort of accessibility aid) you can just ignore them.

Well, fear and burning people to death so they're no longer a threat. Not very efficient, but effective.

And I guess the "practical applications" of your guns, if they don't involve fear, involve gunning people down, right? Don't bother with scaring them off, just kill them.

Between you and me, it seems like the practical application of creating fear is working just great on you, quick-draw.

lol, yeah KB not MB.

damn, how far we really have come. amazing when you think about how many orders of mag we've seen in our life time.

Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?

This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.

Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)

The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.

In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.

For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...

stuff like "hi, my name's romney." or "hi, my name is bush." or any other super rich person.

they really are different from the rest of us little people.

"I know he can GET the job, but can he DO the job? I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you!"

(memorable quote from a really funny movie)

However, we don't normally award punitive damages in civil cases here in the UK, so even if there is a definitive judgement at some stage that Google was invading privacy and failing to protect personal data, it seems unlikely they will suffer more than a token slap on the wrist from a privacy regulator provided that they cease and desist (as it appears they already have). Unfortunately, civil trials here are not very effective at recognising damage that comes in forms other than actual financial loss and doing much to compensate for it and/or discourage similar behaviour in the future.

"we're sorry we have to let you go from amazon. but here, please accept this free extra month of amazon prime for your trouble. acceptance of free month constitutes agreement not to sue our sorry asses."

Yeah. Like I'd ever be caught DEAD or ALIVE in Arizona. Life is too short for that.

Tell that to your six-months-ago self, who wrote the mess you've been debugging all week. :-)

It's only those damn Russians are doing this, all other countries are saint.

Yeah, because that makes it all OK then.

Your comment is designed to distract from the issue at hand, shut down intelligent conversation on the topic, and imply the wrongdoer is just fine because, by implication, "everybody else does it, too" (no evidence to said implication provided, certainly not proven, and probably not true), all without contributing a single creative or new thought to the discussion at all.

Nice job, (Russian?) troll.

but finland, we can just copy their system wholesale

sounds like a deal. we get a good system AND we avoid paying full retail.

Until systemd is removed from a major Linux distro, I would consider that distro to be less secure than even a Windows system.

Some Poettering apologist will probably mark you as a troll, but for completeness there are a number of distros that default to non-systemd init architectures, including but not limited to

Calculate, Gentoo, Funtoo, Source Mage, Dyson, indeed all kinds of distros either default or support running a systemd-free system.