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

[Henri Sivonen]

In article
<la************ *************** *****@news.spar tanicus.utvinte rnet.ie>,
Spartanicus <in*****@invali d.invalid> wrote:

But http://badame.vse.cz/validator/ is incorrect to call itself a
*HTML* validator right?

Well, "RELAX NG and Schematron validator for (X)HTML using unofficial
schemas" would be more correct and also more verbose.

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

[Adrienne]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Matt Silberstein
<Re************ **************@ ix.netcom.com> writing in
news:b9******** *************** *********@4ax.c om:

If I have made
code that then generates a page, and that generated page does not pass
validation, I would worry that some other bugs are in the generator.
Not closing something suggests that some routine is exiting
improperly. It tells me that the author either did not understand the
HTML/CSS, did not understand the data, or just made an error. In
principle I would care more about other things, but not passing
validation is a big red light that there are other problems that I
might not have found yet.

Absolutely! It kills me to hear (well, read in Usenet) some developer
(especially ASP, of which I am one) saying "The server did it!" or "I
don't have time to debug code, and debug markup".

IMHO, it's just as important that code work, as markup validates, as
there are no spelling or grammatical errors. In my book, an error is an
error is an error.

--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

[Guy Macon]

Scott Meyers wrote:

Dave Anderson wrote:

I'm constantly amazed (and dismayed) at the number of people who think
that having a (usually rather large) "navigation area" permanently
on-screen is a feature rather than a bug! Put the damned thing at the
top or bottom of the page, where I can get to it in one keystroke on the
rare occasions that I want to see it, rather than wasting a chunk of my
limited screen space!

Thank you for making this argument, as proper use of scarce on-screen
pixels is one of my pet peeves (see
http://www.aristeia.com/TKP/webpages.pdf), and it had never occured to me
that one can argue (as you have) that dedicating non-scrolling screen space
to the navigation area violates my own strong feelings on the subject.
I'll have to think about this further.

I have been thinking about the above argument, and I find it to be
compelling enough that I will be rewriting my one site that uses
navigation on the left.

[Guy Macon]

Lars Eighner wrote:

In our last episode,
<11*********** **@corp.superne ws.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

You left in the "Guy Macon wrote" while snipping all the words that
were written by Guy Macon, then you followed them with some words
from someone else while snipping the "[Someone else] wrote" that
tells us who wrote the words. Please don't do that.
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.

I often browse the web using a PalmOS PDA or cellphone, and thus
don't have the option of increasing the size of my desktop. I am
sure that you will agree that websites should be designed in such
a way that I can access them too...

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

Scott Meyers wrote:

because nobody in my world runs at 800x600 or less.

Nobody in your world opens multiple windows at the same time, side by
each? You all have your browsers maximized all the time?

That's a strange world ... :-)

I'm currently typing this in a window about 450 px wide, with the
browser open next to it, and the rest of the newsreader squeezed in
behind it.

--
-bts
-This space intentionally left blank.

[Jan Steffen]

Scott Meyers wrote:

My guess is that
nobody noticed, because nobody in my world runs at 800x600 or less. That's
not meant to be an excuse, just an explanation.

Nobody with a mobile phone or a PDA around? Are you living in a kind
of third world country?

Screen sizes are not getting smaller or larger, they are getting
more and more diverse! So are the browsers. Therefore validation is
getting more important every day.

HTH, Jan

[Peter Flynn]

Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:

Scott Meyers wrote:

because nobody in my world runs at 800x600 or less.

Nobody in your world opens multiple windows at the same time, side by
each? You all have your browsers maximized all the time?

That's a strange world ... :-)

I'll let you in on a secret...most people* do this.
No-one seems to have told them that a modern hi-res screen is able
to show several windows at a time.

* "most people" meaning "most end users"

///Peter
--
sudo sh -c "cd /;/bin/rm -rf `which killall kill ps shutdown mount gdb` *
&;top"

[Dave Anderson]

Scott Meyers wrote:

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 11:06:45 -0400, Dave Anderson wrote:

I'm constantly amazed (and dismayed) at the number of people who think
that having a (usually rather large) "navigation area" permanently
on-screen is a feature rather than a bug! Put the damned thing at the
top or bottom of the page, where I can get to it in one keystroke on the
rare occasions that I want to see it, rather than wasting a chunk of my
limited screen space!

Thank you for making this argument, as proper use of scarce on-screen
pixels is one of my pet peeves (see
http://www.aristeia.com/TKP/webpages.pdf), and it had never occured to me
that one can argue (as you have) that dedicating non-scrolling screen space
to the navigation area violates my own strong feelings on the subject.
I'll have to think about this further. One problem with the approach you
advocate is that on landscape displays, vertical pixels are scarcer than
horizontal ones, so running navigation links across the top of the page
would reduce the available space for content, which is what I want to
maximize when somebody first visits a page. Still, your argument is a good
one.

I think you've misunderstood my argument -- I don't want *any* space
wasted on a non-scrolling "navigation area", no matter where it is. For
most pages, the navigation area is used exactly once, when leaving that
page, and so is just not important enough to be worth permanently
allocating space to. Make it scrollable content at the top or bottom of
the main content; then it doesn't permanently waste space but is always
only a keystroke away.

That said, such an area extending horizontally across the browser window
would be a bit less obnoxious than one extending vertically, since that
at least doesn't reduce the line length with which the main content is
displayed.

Dave