Yay I'm with perrin on this. Often when we code a small fragment we just do it out of our heads, so you could get any version of HTML that we learned once. Besides, things like CSS and some of its tricks are not totally browser agnostic. It can be hard enough covering recent versions of IE and Netscape, not to mention Opera, Mozilla, FireBird and Konqueror. Notice I keep Mozilla and FireBird separate, their are differences!

For a production app I will write minimal HTML code so I can prove out the code. Then the HTML/CSS guys start on it. Notice I mention guys, there are two of them to one of me doing the coding. We have just spent $40k for a client and we did a costing analysis last week. Per functional block of code and HTML/CSS (maybe three or four CGI::Application run modes and three or four templates) the average cost is approximately $400. Per block this represents about 2 hours of programmer time but around 5 hours of HTML/CSS time. This doesn't include 'overall design of the look of the site', this is a separate item in the billing. This is tweaking HTML and CSS to be browser agnostic and to cover differences from browser to browser.

Good practices do carry over. Even to HTML, if you really have to do it yourself!

Greed, parsimony, hubris and laziness should always characterise a programmer. But so should knowledge, precision, generosity and communication.

jdtoronto