Should we loose our Coding ethics upon client request , against Web standards, W3C Validation and Semantics

Question

Should we loose our Coding ethics upon client request , against Web standards, W3C Validation and Semantics?

If client is agreed and want website quickly anyhow. don't care about validation, Standards , Accessibility.

Answer 1

Part of 'coding ethics' is adhering to the requirements and specification. You won't always like it, but you gotta do it. Or you could decline the job and have your competitor do it.

Answer 2

We always have work now and then that doesn't represent what we stand for as a company. If we do such work, it probably won't make it to our "wall of fame", because we don't feel it really fits our vision.

I think it really depends on how you feel with it; you need the money? you want it? you feel sorry if you let it go? then take it and do it :-)

Answer 3

Do as much standard adherence as possible without having to charge substantially more (i.e. without slipping the schedule). In many cases, I found adhering to web standards not really harder than hacking away the code, it's just a little different. If you have a good IDE, it will help you with this (like the red squiggles in Visual Studio, for non-standard HTML tags and Intellisense for CSS).

Answer 4

It is up to the client to decide if spending X% more will get X% more profit. Do they expect visually impaired people to want their product? Do they know all their users use IE and spending time making it cross-browser-perfect isn't too important?

These kind of things can be analysed from a business perspective - they want something that serves their needs, not a piece of art. Your job is to see what their needs are.

Answer 5

You could try making a business case for sticking to standards. Perhaps if you make an estimate of

• how many more people will be able to view the site
• how much time will be saved on maintenance
• how much easier it will be to add new functionality in future

you can help persuade them that it is in their interests to spend a little more time now to do it right.

Answer 6

The only reason to have, "Coding ethics," (if I'm interpretting correctly what you mean by this) is to make software development cheaper without lowering the software's quailty or to make software of higher quality without increasing software development costs (or both) than would be the case without those ethics.

If your customer is paying you to produce lower quality or more expensive software, fine, just let them know the consequences.

If your customer can point to a competitor of yours that's producing higher qualilty software cheaper, then you deserve to be crushed out of business.

If you find that dropping any of your coding ethics results in higher quality software for the same cost or lower cost software of the same quality, then your customer has done you a great favour.