Re: How important is validation?
- From: David Ross <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2005 12:32:14 -0700
Scott Meyers wrote:
>
> 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).
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. My own sampling in April of this
year showed IE was the browser in 81% of the hits on 13 of my
eclectic Web pages. That means almost 20% of those who visited my
Web site were NOT using IE.
The point of all this is that you should design your Web pages for
viewing by ANY browser. To do that, you should design to the HTML
and CSS specifications and not to any specific browser at all. If
"It looks okay with IE" is your criterion, however, you have tied
yourself to a fading star.
Please see my
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/internet/Webdevelopers.html>. See also
<URL:http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/index.html>.
If you are indeed a software professional, have a professional
attitude about this. Take pride in your work. Can you really be
proud of a home Web page that has 13 HTML errors? What does that
say about your professionalism and your computer expertise?
--
David E. Ross
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/>
I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
complies with Web standards. See <URL:http://www.mozilla.org/>.
.
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