Re: How important is validation?

David Ross wrote :

[snipped]


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.


I agree with you generally speaking. I agree that supporting all browsers (content remains accessible in all browsers, navigation remains functional in all browsers) is a goal in itself. For old browsers, I only check my documents so that the content will remain accessible, viewable and links are functional in user agents without CSS support and without javascript support.

Please see my
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/internet/Webdevelopers.html>. See also
<URL:http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/index.html>.


The anybrowser.org site and webpages has not been updated for years. Several of their statements no longer makes sense anymore.

I'm looking more and more for campain like this one:

Any Modern Browser Campaign
http://merri.net/anymodernbrowser.shtml

Trying to support MSIE 5.x which does not comply with the CSS1 box model has become a real nightmare. Right now, world-wide, there are more Firefox users than there are MSIE 5.x users... and that's good news.

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?


IMO, markup validation is never enough promoted. It is known that 98% of all webpages out there on the web fail markup validation testing.

Here's what I wrote at Front Page, MSIE 6 and MSIE 7 wikimedia Internet Explorer Feedback pages:


Front Page Feedback page
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.FrontPageFeedback
:

-  Basic Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priorities

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 "Ensure that the tool automatically generates valid markup. [Priority 1]"

* Ensure that the markup produced by the tool, in any of its supported languages, is valid.
* Publish proprietary language specifications or DTD's on the Web, to allow documents to be validated.
* Use namespaces and schemas to make documents that can be automatically transformed to a known markup language.

ATAG 1.0 Ensure that the tool automatically generates valid markup

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 "If markup produced by the tool does not conform to World Wide Web Consortium W3C specifications, inform the author."

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 "Allow the author to transform presentation markup that is misused to convey structure into structural markup, and to transform presentation markup used for style into style sheets. [Priority 3]"

e.g.
# HTML: table-based layout into CSS.
# HTML: BR to the P element.
# HTML: (deprecated) FONT into heuristically or author-determined structure.
# Word processor styles to Web styles.
# HTML: deprecated presentational markup into CSS.


http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.FrontPageFeedback

--------

Internet Explorer Standards Support

# Built-in Webpage Quality indicator icon: Implement a feature which will report back to the user if a page uses valid code, has markup and/or parsing CSS errors: some sort of a Webpage Quality indicator icon (smiley or green check for valid page, frown or red 'X' when invalid) on the statusbar (or somewhere else) which when clicked would report more info to the user and give him more options among which one would be to validate the page with the W3C validator. Implement something like HTML Tidy (http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/index.html) as an extension or an option into IE 7 and for IE 7 users. [ICab 3 and Amaya 9.2.1 reports CSS parsing errors. ICab 2+ reports some markup errors or bad coding practices]

# W3C HTML 4.01 specs recommend browsers to notify users about markup/syntax errors in pages: "We also recommend that user agents provide support for notifying the user of such errors." http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/appendix/notes.html#h-B.1

http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerStandardsSupport
also at
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerBugs
under Built-in Webpage Quality indicator icon

Gérard
--
remove blah to email me
.

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