W3C Validation, Who Cares?

Ok, I have been spending alot of time getting my new site w3c validated. I have succeeded it doing so! However, I decided to have a look around at some of the larger sites that you would expect to comply with w3c. However most of them are not!

Take Apple for example...

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3...utomatically%29

Microsoft:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3...utomatically%29

eBay:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3...utomatically%29

Macromedia:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3...utomatically%29

My question is, does anyone care about this at all? Does it really make a difference, since most browsers now know how to handle these sites anyway. Is it worth it?

Hey long time no post for me. Sorry for my lack of participation, but marching band has completly taken over my life for the past few months. Anyway.... I feel the same way you do, most, if not all modern browsers can handle these things in the first place without issues, especially more advanced ones like browsers based on the mozilla source (i.e. firefox, safari). The one site I run as a job isn't validated, but unless people complain about compatibility issues, I don't plan to go through this process. ( http://www.wadistrictbsa.org )

Validation is one of those things that is in it's infancy.. Right now W3C Validation isn't as important because people like Apple and Microsoft haven't fully adopted it yet but also you have to realize how much work it would take to make thier sites compliant. We're talking thousands of pages... Most of which are ASP(.NET), PHP, CGI, and whatever else. Also, browsers like Netscape 4, IE5- etc are still in use even though us web-savvy people are smarter than that to use them and all of that old kruddy code is to accomidate them. Nay, validation is for the future of the web.. Browsers are slowly getting more and more compliant and validation is meant for those new browsers. You're making your site compliant now, so you won't have to do it again down the road...

Validation is important, but it's still a bleeding edge concept. Give it time....

Martini wrote:

No... W3 standards have been arround for MANY MANY years, and the validator has been arround for a while too


First off, I think that you mean following W3 standards is not important. Second. What the hell does this point have to do with why YOU should or shouldn't make your site W3C compliant. All standards are backwards compatible. If I write an XHTML 1.1 Strict page (like they all are), then open it in IE5, it will work fine.


How does it matter that these pages are powered by ASP, PHP, CGI, or XYZ? That should make it even easier to move to a new standard, since things are templated.

Have you ever tried moving a page from HTML 4.01 Transitional (most pages can be classified like that, even if they are incredibly sloppy) to XHTML 1.1 strict? It's not THAT difficult, besides font tags (which NEVER were legal), and closin all tags.


There are also good browsers, like Firefox, and iCab, which have been supporting strict standars all along.

[qupte]Validation is important, but it's still a bleeding edge concept. Give it time....[/quote]
Again, not bleeding edge, but rather years old.


The way that I see it, you just posted some incorrect reasons as to why one may not want to move a site to a VERY strict standard. So don't! Stay at XHTML 1.0 Strict (or god forbid, even transitional!)

If people like you don't make your pages compliant, then browsers will not be as compliant, becuase there is no need (See IE's CSS implementation)


So why do we follow standards, even if many others don't? Because they should.

The above message is an anti-anti-standards rant.
Please note that I'm not trying to attack any one person.

Compliance is only necessary if you want your page to look the same in all browsers and act the same way. It is important, but sometimes the effort needed to make a page W3C compliant may not be worth it to the developer. Time is money, and many professionals do not have the time to make every single aspect compliant, but to make sure the general look stays the same. Validation would only occur when completely new versions of the sites are made because no one is going to shell out the money to recode something that no one is going to notice. The problem is to get all people to use W3C standards, but that is never going to happen.

I like to compare web standards to English. As long as some people say "mash" and others say "push", but they still mean the same thing and nothing is going to change. Same with FONT tags...

If you declare a DOCTYPE, you should make sure that the page validates with that doctype, else the browser could choke. If you are going to write ill-formed HTML, don't declare a doctype.

The motivation behind moving towards valid HTML and CSS is largely due to the fact that there aren't that many static web sites any more. Most of the content is dynamically generated, if not at request time, then at the time the site is uploaded. The purpose of the newer HTML standards is to get people to start using HTML as a purely structural markup language. This has a number of benefits, including but not limited to:
[ul]
[*]Faster page loading time since there aren't dozens of redundant style tags.
[*]Easier maintenance, more consistent layout.
[*]Allows for better separation of structure from style in scripts/programs that generate HTML as well.
[*]Sites are more accessible, since programs can reliably use the markup to understand the document structure. This makes search engines' jobs easier, and they will reward you.
[*]You can later realize the benefits of XML/XSL-oriented frameworks such as Apache Cocoon that make your job much easier.[/ul]
As for me personally, I do all my development with XHTML (among other XML schema). It has made my life so much easier.

There are a lots of reasons that some companies don't adhere to standards.One might be that fixing their sites to use the standards would be extremely costly. Another is that they are using third-party frameworks or tools that don't care about standards.


Not true. IE 5 will choke on the XML declaration, and it does not properly recognize the XHTML MIME type, "application/xhtml+xml". If you serve the page as text/html, it will not parse the document correctly.

Post edited by: igni ferroque, at: 2004/11/23 08:22