Devil’s Advocate - Why You SHOULD’NT Validate Your Website
Monday, December 17th, 2007Categories: Web Usability, Web Development
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This will be the first article to kick off my Devil’s Advocate series, a series dedicated to seeing a point-of-view I don’t necessarily believe and making an attempt to push it. They will be based on past articles that I have written.
The Article
This week’s installment plays devil’s advocate to my past article on Why You Should Validate Your Website. If you’re curious as to what validation is, there is some information in that article as well.
Let’s get this show on the road.
Reasons For Not Validating Your Website
- If It Looks and Works Fine, Why Bother? - Let’s be serious, a lot of bad code works in a lot of browsers. Making sure you closed your <li> tag or something similar probably won’t be the end of the world. If it looks fine in IE6,IE7 and Firefox, it’ll likely be fine.
- Time Consuming - You could have worked on a site for a good 8 hours only to find that you’ve got 40 errors. If each of these errors takes a minute, you’ve almost wasted an hour of your time simply so you can have the status to say your website validate.
- Screen Readers and Search Engines are Accommodating - Having crawled MySpace pages and Geocities pages, I imagine that Google’s spiders and screen readers have gotten used to not-so-perfect code and has learnt how to work with it.
That’s all I can come with. Anyone else have ideas as to why you shouldn’t validate your website?
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Related Posts
- Hundredth Post - Looking Back On The Blog
- Why You Should Validate Your Website
- Devil’s Advocate - Why You Shouldn’t Use SWFObject
December 18th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
Good point, Pat. Validation can be overhyped. I’d like to comment on #2, though.
While it might take some time to fix those 40 errors that don’t really matter, I’d suggest a long-range view. Taking the time to see what those errors are, and to learn how to write better code, will save you time. There may be 40 inconsequential errors today, but tomorrow might bring 2 errors that really matter…and using a validator is a good way to find out where your coding skills might need work.
I’ve been hand-writing websites since 1999…and I still learn from my mistakes. If that’s true, then the average person needs to learn that much more. The validators are a quick and easy way to learn.
December 18th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Thanks for the comment Tony.
Those 40 errors, although they may not mean anything today, also may cause problems in future browsers or future incarnations of browsers.
I agree whole-heartedly with you.
December 19th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Back in the days when Windows was found by typing in WIN at the DOS prompt, I decided to make a web page for my part time business. Since then I have gone through I don’t know how many versions of FrontPage. It was the best you could get at the time, and I have stuck with it. Unfortunately, we all know how bloated their code is and this forced me to learn to raw code to fix it.
I have recently decided to take my site out of tables and have been struggling with a pure CSS site that validates XHTML strict. I am not quite sure why, I think someone must have told me it was a good idea at some point. My problem is that I have customers who range from a small screen with the font size WAY up to large screen with the font size small. You have got to admit, tables keep all those elements in place no matter how people choose to view the site! Although I think I have the problem figured out now, I can no longer use FP forms (without a js hack), FP webbots for navigation or anything having to do with Amazon because it just won’t validate. If anyone has any suggestions for getting around those limitations, I would be happy to hear them.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Kris:
It IS a good idea to learn to code and design with CSS. One of the main reasons is that you have customers with different screen sizes. Valid XHTML makes it easier for different media (screens, readers, projectors, phones, etc) to use the same site…and valid and semantic XHTML + CSS makes your job a lot easier down the road.
I know it’s a big leap, but I’d recommend making the jump from FP to a notepad replacement program like Notepad++. You can begin each project with the same basic file, which includes a doctype and title and stuff that belongs in every website. The W3 Schools is a great place to study CSS to make sure you get all of the basics…then subscribe to blogs like Pat’s to keep learning. Believe it or not, I can make better websites more quickly from scratch and by hand than most people can make using software. It’s not because I’m amazing or anything, it’s because doing it by hand is simpler.
Let me know if there’s any way I can help.
December 19th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Oh, yeah…I wouldn’t worry about XHTML Strict. I’d shoot for XHTML 1.0 Transitional. =)
December 19th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Tony,
Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound whiny before. I thought we were *supposed* be thinking of ways to avoid validating:-)) FP’s poor markup has forced me to learn a lot more than I ever wanted to know about CSS and XHTML. I haven’t tried Notepad ++ but I have learned that if I want to markup a page that FP changed as soon as I hit the save button, I need to write it in a plain text editor (Notepad) and import it. Sheesh!
Do you have any idea why I can’t do a copyright symbol? It keeps changing itself to an A with the symbol next to it. I have tried both inserting the symbol as a font, and using the & copy; notation but it still keeps a changing.
December 19th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Try typing this: © …it’s the code that makes the little circle c.
December 19th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
& copy ; without spaces…
December 19th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Tony,
I tried & copy; (you can’t type that all as one word or you get the copyright symbol). Still get the Â
December 20th, 2007 at 11:20 am
If you’re typing & copy ; without spaces and it’s still not working, then it’s being translated improperly…that’s the proper code. You might also try &# 169 ; without spaces.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Kris, do you have a line of code that looks like this:
< meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" / >
(without the spaces)
It defines the character set which could be the problem.
December 20th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
My apologies to both of you, I just wasn’t clear in my original post. Yes, I use & copy; without the space, but I can’t type that here or the copyright symbol shows up. My DOCTYPE is:
It’s not THAT big of an issue, I just thought a guru would know:-))
December 20th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Oh, look at that, you can’t put in a DOCTYPE either. Heavy sigh. Try this without the dots.
December 20th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Once more without the
!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”
html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en”
December 20th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Kris:
I’m thinking that there’s been some miscommunication here…is there more we might help you with? I won’t presume to know the answers to all of your questions, but I’m willing to try.
As posted, either & copy ; OR &# 169 ; (remove the spaces) will create a copyright symbol. If those don’t work, it could be that you’re using a program like FP that messes things up.
Is there more? Did I misunderstand?