Randomly came across this story on digg, and turns out I saw a framilier site! I couldn’t agree more - validation in many aspects is important, but to turn off features such as yahoo’s tracking (one example) simply because it doesn’t validate doesn’t make sense.
How important is validation?
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I have a confession to make.
While I work hard to make my businesses homepage validate, and I try to keep my smaller sites validated, I let it slide on bigger sites. And I let warnings pile up. And I started wondering if I was alone… This post on boompa.com seemed to validate my validation apathy:
…The merit-badge coolness of having “valid” markup has 0% to do with your business, your site’s functionality and has 100% to do with ego. By all means, if you have the time to painfully scrutinize your code to such a level for that cereal box award go for it, but for the rest of us, we’re just happy the site is running and looks good in all 3 major browsers.
But I’ve posted here and on other blogs about my support for valid XHTML and CSS. Am I flip-flopping? No. I think that valid markup is essential to the evolution of the web. I’m only questioning the necessity of the “Valid CSS” marker that we proudly display on our validated sites. It’s great when you can get it, but should I delay a fully functional sites release because it doesn’t validate? This post offered some interesting views on what actually matters in a site:
Should we be concerned about valid code? Of course we should, what we shouldn’t do however is see validation as the be all and end all. It is more important that we ensure our sites meet their purpose, are satisfying for the end users and meet the goals of the site owner be that ourselves or a client. Writing valid code in many ways is the easy part, remembering that a validating site is not necessarily an accessible site, an attractive site, a useable site or indeed a profitable site is perhaps even more important.
So ultimately, were I forced to answer the question “how important is validation?”, I would say it’s important in so far as it encourages us all to follow web standards and code according to best practices, to create a web that is accessible, usable, and visually pleasing. However, the “merit badge”, as Dave Snider called it, is just that. Not a prerequisite to creating the best sites on the web, not something the end user is even going to notice. All that matters, ultimately, is a clean, accessibly, degradable and easily navigatable website.
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08.09.06 / 10pm
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08.09.06 / 10pm
Hey, I got a digg in the first 5 minutes! Good to see you man. This blog is a perfect example. It’s all valid code, in it’s individual parts, but there’s no way a generated page will pass validation. I’m not going to start stripping features and pull the blog just because I can’t get the badge. Apparently, I’m preaching to the choir ;->.
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08.10.06 / 2pm
UGH, all this validation is a waste of time. Imagine coding absolutely everything so precisely so you can what…have a W3C spider it to check if it’s valid? Have your boss eyeball your code looking for inconsistencies? Have some third rate hacker get in there and leave a bunch of comments? Har! We use Dreamweaver at my office and I and my coworkers couldn’t be happier at the code it generates. Whoopee! :-*
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