Is it good practice to create a background job within an init script if the process can not daemonize itself?

Question

I am fairly new to *nix, and have come across the need to drop multiple processes, that should be run 100% of the time. to background using &.

I use the following line in an init.d script to do this (running as the user user:

su -c 'process arg1 arg2 -w - | process2 arg1 -r - &' user

(where -w writes to and -r reads from STDOUT, STDIN)

Specifically, I know this is not generally acceptable, as the processes aren't well shielded from outside influence.

Is it acceptable to create background jobs for "services?"

Should I instead use a FIFO/named pipe to handle the interprocess communication?

If so, should I still create both processes as background jobs? Is this stable?

For specifics, please refer to this mailing list thread.

Thanks,

Matt