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First, as long as we're talking XML, let me use this space to bend your ear on Web Standards. For those of you that don't care (you should!), you can pick your favorite feed below and move along, and I thank you very much for reading.
My continuous goal is for every page on this site to be compatible with the W3C's strictest standards:
Web Standards are more than just rules that Web sites "have to follow." They help make Web sites more accessible to people with disabilities, they make sites run faster and easier to maintain, and as a result they reduce costs for people on both sides of the network. Companies can save money and time using Web Standards, those savings result in larger saturation and usefulness of the Web, and all of us get a better chance to keep in touch with each other, get educated, and yes, entertained.
For many Web professionals, strictly following Web Standards is an unnecessary annoyance. We've been using table layouts and spacer .gifs for years, and it's gotten to be second nature. We've heard that using semantic markup and CSS-based layouts has a steep learning curve. Internet Explorer doesn't follow the standards as closely as other browsers, and it has a 90% marketshare worldwide. All browsers degrade sloppy HTML gracefully; we can code like amateurs and most of our end users and customers will never know the difference.
Consider the extreme opposite of using standards. When the Web first came on the scene, multiple vesions of HTML popped up, and certain sites were only compatible with certain browsers (this is why the W3C formed in the first place). Imagine going to Amazon.com to order DVDs and then linking to CNN to read the news, only to find that you have close Internet Explorer and open Firefox to do it. The user experience would be horrible and the Web would not be as ubiquitous as it is. We take pride in our choice of image editing software or programming language. Why don't most of us translate that into the care we put into the part of our sites that people actually see?
In the 1950s, my father was a young boy riding in a truck with his grandfather looking at the corn growing in their family's fields. The corn was only about a foot high, and my father could see that the rows of corn were perfectly straight from front to back, side to side, and diagonally. He asked about it and his grandfather rustled his hair and just chuckled in response. He watched as they drove by the next field and it passed outside the window with crooked cross rows and diagonals. "But Grandpa, why do you take the time to do that when nobody else does?" In my great grandfather's mind, the answer was simple. "That's exactly why I do it, Son. That's exactly why I do it."
I strive to adhere to the strictest standards of whatever field I'm a part of, whether that be at work or at home. If you are a Web professional, you should also for yourself and your audience. The next time you redesign your Web site or work with someone else to do so, demand that the designers and the developers be knowledgeable of Web Standards. They should put that knowledge to practice, even if few do. It will make the Web that much better.