Again, I'm not a web developer, but does that mean there is something 'wrong' with the standards?
Although there's nothing "wrong" per se, the standards are excessively strict, and slight nonconformity will not cause rendering issues in any browser. For example, non-literal attribute values, while not technically standards compliant, is properly recognized by every HTML parser in existence. Arguably, such usage conforms to a "democratic standard," rendering the W3C's say irrelevant on this specific matter.
Furthermore, W3C's validation tool doesn't work very well. In Google's case, it's flagged bits of string literals (URLs in links, specifically) as invalid.