How important is validation?

[Scott Meyers]

I have a web site that, due to maintenance by several people, some of whom are
fairly clueless about HTML and CSS, etc. (notably me), has gotten to the point
where I'm pretty sure it's suffering from bit rot. Though the pages seem to
display okay under IE and FF, I really think it's time for an under-the-hood
cleaning. I recently received a copy of Molly Holzschlag's "Spring Into HTML
and CSS," and in the first chapter, she makes a big deal of producing pages
that validate cleanly. However, she doesn't explain why this is important,
e.g., doesn't say what the consequences of validation failure are.

I went to http://validator.w3.org/ and was unsurprised to see my home page
fail to validate. But then I got to playing around, and I found that the home
pages for none of the following validate, either: yahoo, ebay, google, artima,
and cnn. This makes me wonder whether validation is really something I need
to worry about. Morally, I'm all for standards, and given a choice between
pages that validate and those that do not, I'd choose validation, but I'm
going to have to find somebody else to do the work for me (somebody who DOES
know about HTML and CSS, etc.), and I'm worried that finding somebody who is
familiar with validation is going to be a lot harder and/or more expensive
than finding somebody who is not.

Can somebody please explain to me what the practical advantages of having
pages validate are? Also, I'm open to suggestions on who to consider hiring
to do the work at my site (which happens to be aristeia.com).

Thanks,

Scott

[Lars Eighner]

In our last episode,
<11************ *@corp.supernew s.com>,
the lovely and talented Guy Macon
broadcast on comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html:

Maybe all website designers have giant monitors on which they run a
browser full-screen, so they've got space to waste. I always have
multiple windows open, and never have enough screen real-estate
available

So why don't you increase the size of your desktop? I find a
3x3 is more than adequate: that's two full screen browsers, a
word processor, a text edior, a couple of screens for graphic
work, a terminal, a screen full of control-panel type junk, and
one left over. It is also convenient to jump around with a mod
key and the key pad, which conveniently has an intuitive
relationship to a 3x3 layout.

--
Lars Eighner ei*****@io.com http://www.larseighner.com/
I don't see posts from or threads started from googlegroups.
"We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with
Kuwait." -- Bush's Ambassador April Glaspie, giving Saddam Hussein
the greenlight to invade Kuwait.

[Spartanicus]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

As much as I support validating, to claim that validation ensures
cross browser compatibility and/or can replace testing in various
browsers is nonsense.
While the word "ensures" there is clearly a hopeless exaggeration,

I hope you are attributing the exaggeration to David Ross.
validation can nevertheless reveal errors which would be fixed-up in
different ways by different browsers. Correcting those errors is no
less optional than correcting spelling mistakes in a decently-produced
web page.

Spelling errors are revealed to all users 100% of the time, validation
errors are often both invisible and of no consequence to most visitors.

Comparing natural language syntax with markup and/or styling language
syntax makes no sense and can only muddy an already poorly understood
aspect of web authoring.

--
Spartanicus

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Lars Eighner wrote:

So why don't you increase the size of your desktop? I find a
3x3 is more than adequate:

I typically want to see two or more windows that I'm currently working
on alongside each other - not to merely have the option to switch
between them.

The remaining windows can indeed be hidden from view for the time
being - either behind the several currently active windows, or
minimised, or on another logical screen - but that's a different
matter.

Anyway, this isn't really the point. As an author, it's our job to
produce web pages that are useful and convenient for our *readers*.

Hassling each other here (most of us are presumably here because we
regard ourselves as web *authors*) to use our own displays in
different ways doesn't really address that important principle of
authoring for our users.

best regards.

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Spartanicus wrote:

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

As much as I support validating, to claim that validation ensures
cross browser compatibility and/or can replace testing in various
browsers is nonsense.
While the word "ensures" there is clearly a hopeless exaggeration,

I hope you are attributing the exaggeration to David Ross.

I'm sorry - I thought my meaning was evident from the context.

validation can nevertheless reveal errors which would be fixed-up
in different ways by different browsers. Correcting those errors
is no less optional than correcting spelling mistakes in a
decently-produced web page.

[...] Comparing natural language syntax with markup and/or styling
language syntax makes no sense
Was I comparing them? I was trying to say that both can contribute to
a quality web page.
and can only muddy an already poorly understood aspect of web
authoring.

I say that both are aspects of quality control in publishing a web
page. I did not mean to imply that the two things are equivalent in
principle. I stand by my original assertion that both can and should
be non-optional quality control features of a web publishing process.

I'm not, of course, suggesting that correctness of either, or even
both, of them is a complete QA programme! Markup can be syntactically
correct while being semantically nonsense; spell checking can pass the
wrong word if the wrong word is spelled correctly. But both
procedures stand a chance of picking up inadvertent errors which would
be better corrected. And potentially much more effective as a QA
procedure than merely reviewing the completed page on one or a few
browsers. Sadly, the browser review is also a necessary chore
(particularly with MSIE, which rules itself out in various ways as a
web-compatible browser), but I still say that the formal syntax check
is a valuable and IMHO non-optional part of QA in the web publishing
process.

all the best

[Spartanicus]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

>validation can nevertheless reveal errors which would be fixed-up
>in different ways by different browsers. Correcting those errors
>is no less optional than correcting spelling mistakes in a
>decently-produced web page.

[...]

Comparing natural language syntax with markup and/or styling
language syntax makes no sense

Was I comparing them?

"Correcting those [validation] errors is no less optional than
correcting spelling mistakes [...]" suggests a comparison of some sorts.
I was trying to say that both can contribute to
a quality web page.
No argument there.
I'm not, of course, suggesting that correctness of either, or even
both, of them is a complete QA programme!

I know.

I'm concerned that albeit with good intentions people are using
incorrect arguments to justify validation. Imo the case for validation
cannot be summed up in a few simple "here's why you should" type rules.
Providing a case depends on many other variables.

Notwithstanding considerations such as voiced by the OP (requiring it
narrowing down the list of people able to do the work), perhaps
reversing the logic is the better approach: there are no good reasons
not to produce valid code [1].

[1] for the sticklers amongst us who think they've detected me
contradicting myself with an earlier post in the thread, note the
"public DTD" qualifier of that earlier post.

--
Spartanicus

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Spartanicus wrote:

Was I comparing them?
"Correcting those [validation] errors is no less optional than
correcting spelling mistakes [...]" suggests a comparison of some sorts.

So, if I were to remark that in book publishing, checking of spelling
and of punctuation were both important, would you accuse me of
muddying the vital distinction between spelling and punctuation?
I'm concerned that albeit with good intentions people are using
incorrect arguments to justify validation. Imo the case for
validation cannot be summed up in a few simple "here's why you
should" type rules.
Well, I'm sorry, but from my point of view, markup syntax validation
is a natural part of the QA process for web publishing; I don't feel I
need to justify it, any more than I'd need to justify checking the
spelling of the content, or making a reasonable effort to verify the
facts which I'm going to report on the page.

As I see it, it's the responsibility of anyone who claims that any of
these QA checks are unnecessary, to produce a convincing argument as
to why it's unnecessary, and I haven't yet seen an argument that I
found convincing. Some claimed that they were assembling the web page
automatically from parts that were stored in a database or content
manglement system, but that's no excuse for not having an assembly
process that either guarantees to produce correct markup syntax, or
one that checks the result of the assembly, IMNSHO.
Notwithstanding considerations such as voiced by the OP (requiring
it narrowing down the list of people able to do the work), perhaps
reversing the logic is the better approach: there are no good
reasons not to produce valid code [1].

It looks as if we might be converging on some kind of agreement, in
our different ways ;-)

best regards

[Spartanicus]

"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

>Was I comparing them?
"Correcting those [validation] errors is no less optional than
correcting spelling mistakes [...]" suggests a comparison of some sorts.

So, if I were to remark that in book publishing, checking of spelling
and of punctuation were both important, would you accuse me of
muddying the vital distinction between spelling and punctuation?

The flaw in your (original) statement lies in the suggestion that both
have a similar effect on the user experience. This, as I pointed out
earlier, is not the case. I see no point in twisting an already
fundamentally flawed comparison between natural and markup/style
languages.

The OP is looking for a "be a good dog, validate and here is your bone"
reasoning and wants to know what bone he's going to get. My argument is
that there may be no bone, or at least that the bone is undefined in the
absence of further data.
It looks as if we might be converging on some kind of agreement, in
our different ways ;-)

Hope springs eternal.

--
Spartanicus

[Henri Sivonen]

In article <Pi************ *************** ***@ppepc56.ph. gla.ac.uk>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <fl*****@ph.gla .ac.uk> wrote:

I'm not, of course, suggesting that correctness of either, or even
both, of them is a complete QA programme! Markup can be syntactically
correct while being semantically nonsense; spell checking can pass the
wrong word if the wrong word is spelled correctly.

One problem is that markup can validate and still be even
*syntactically* nonsense.

Example:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht....fi%2Ftest%2Fv
alid-img.html&ss=1

The problem is, of course, that DTDs are inadequate for expressing all
the requirements set forth in the HTML 4.01 spec that should be
machine-checkable.

Petr Nalevka has developed (building on James Clark's work) RELAX NG and
Schematron schemas that express more constraints than the HTML and XHTML
DTDs. His validator is available at http://badame.vse.cz/validator/

However, that validator uses TagSoup for HTML parsing, so some errors
are fixed before validation. I have been working on solving that problem
with HTML5 conformance checking in mind:
http://listserver.dreamhost.com/pipe.../2005-August/0
04536.html

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

[dingbat]

Henri Sivonen wrote:

One problem is that markup can validate and still be even
*syntactically* nonsense.

That's a reasonable caveat, but it depends on some nit-picking over
"validate" as meaning "that which an available validator does" rather
than "comply with the specification". The absence of a validator
capable of detecting its errors does not mean that your example is in
any way "valid", or that any reasonable and competent person would
claim it to be so.

[Dr John Stockton]

JRS: In article <42************ ***@nowhere.not >, dated Sun, 14 Aug 2005
12:32:14, seen in news:comp.infos ystems.www.authoring.html, David Ross
<no****@nowhere .not> posted :

According to one estimate, Internet Explorer (IE) reached a peak
market share of 88.0% of all browsers in March 2003. Since then,
it has declined to 73.5%. Other estimates might show IE still well
above 80% or even 90% of the market, but they all seem to agree
that IE's share is declining.

I doubt whether those are market shares.

A market share should include only browsers that have been chosen for
use, and should omit those that came with the system.

They are more likely to be usage shares; but those are likely to be
affected by the much-used copies of default browsers used in libraries,
which attract low-value users.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. ?@merlyn.demon. co.uk Turnpike v4.00 IE 4 ©
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