May 09 2008 at 8:23am
The importance of validation, revisited
Note: This post was written about 2 months ago but never published. My apoligies for being out of date but I thought it was interesting enough to post.
I brought this up over a year ago and this time, others are talking about it. Jeff Croft says that “Your markup validator, whether it’s the one on the W3C site or one built into your favorite coding tool, is not a measuring stick for greatness.”
It’s like a spell checker … but not
This is an oft made comparison: the validator is like a spell checker. You wouldn’t turn in a school assignment or publish a print document without spell checking would you? Right. You’re also not going to put a sticker on it to say that you passed the spell checker.
And, of course, we all know that the spell checker can’t catch your grammar mistakes or misuse of words blah blah blah, you know what I mean here.
On the other hand, it might not make that much of a difference if you’ve got a few validation errors. In fact, most of the time it won’t. This page might have some validation errors, I actually don’t know if it does or not, I haven’t checked lately. It would be pretty dumb to spend your time going around checking validation on your sites all the time. Although I must admit, i do have the HTML validator extension installed in Firefox. When I use Firefox (which is only for testing…).
It’s not that important to me
Really, it’s not. It may make me slightly uncomfortable, and I may try to fix things if its convenient. But most of the time I’ve got better things to do. It’s not the end of the world if a page isn’t valid.
Suggesting validation to others
In the comments on Croft’s article people are talking about suggesting validation to others in forums. We do tend to do this sometimes at TWF but it’s often because the code is so bad that it’s really difficult to pick out what the problem might be. We may also suggest that people run the validator if they’re having a lot of display issues. We would never just say “run a validator” and leave it at that though. We would explain that if the code is correct it can often help to straighten out display problems etc.
Web Standards != Validation
The validator also doesn’t cover all of the many facets of standards compliance. Web standards are much more than validation alone. To me, it’s most important to follow standards in this sense (using proper semantics, separating presentation from content, minimizing extraneous code etc.). I’m sure you’ve seen the examples of really bad code that passes the validator.
And you?
How often do you validate? Do you obsess about it? Does it take precedence over other aspects of web development?
Edit: My apologies if anyone attempted to comment on this post and wasn’t able to. I upgraded my wordpress and it was doing some weird things.
Gary Ion June 2nd, 2008 at 7:39 am
As an amature designer and programmer I look at validation as a way to confirm all is ok even though when errors are reported my sites are actualy working ok.
I do believe that we all should be working to a minimum standard as in any other industry
Megan June 2nd, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Hi Gary,
That’s a good way to look at it. I’m not sure if you read my previous post or not, but I certainly don’t mean to say that it’s okay not to validate at all. It’s just that some of us tend to get too obsessed with it to the detriment of other aspects of our sites.
This post is also coming from the perspective of someone who has been working with web standards for 6 or 7 years. I’m sort of “over” validation, and even standards if you know what I mean. I still follow them – they are ingrained into my way of working. I just don’t think about it too much.
Megan June 3rd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Another thing I should add is that I’m not talking about accepting hundreds of errors and going back to tag soup. What I’m saying is that it might not be so vital always ensure that every special character is encoded and every <p> tag is closed correctly. There are too many other things to worry about to spend all your time checking the validator and fixing the little things.
I also wanted to emphasize the point that validation is only a small part of web standards. By focussing to much on validtion you could be missing out on a lot of other important aspects.
David Hucklesby June 20th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
In essence, I agree with you. The validator is another tool, not an arbiter of good design or anything else.
Aiming for absolute perfection may well be a waste of time. Especially if you use an XHTML DOCTYPE then serve it up as HTML, which does allows some tags– like P– to be not closed, plus other things not allowed in XHTML.
However, if things go wrong, the *first* thing I would do is validate — to a strict DOCTYPE, too, even if I intend to use Transitional for some reason.