Thursday, 29 Nov, 2007  |    1 Comment

This is about validation and clean coding techniques. Recently, I discovered the w3c validator.

Everybody knows it, everybody use it...or everybody ignores it? Maybe the latter is true! Let's start from the basics: after some modifications this current template (typography), thought about of giving the (in)famous W3C Validator a go.

By Clicking on a link on the sidebar, near the end where it says "Valid XHTML", I was then redirected to the W3C Validator.

After the checks, I found something like 12+ errors! Amazing!

All I did was install WordPress, add some plugins, added this nice theme and wrote some random articles.

The bad results were in some way related to dumb errors, made by me when I wrote my first posts (I wrote pure html instead of using the editor, so I forgot to use hyphens, etc.).

Then I tried to figure my errors (and tried to solve them). I solved the solvable, the other errors ended up on a "future tasks" list (maybe someday I'll figure them out).

In conclusion, for the W3C Validator my site is crap.

Anyway, once I was on it, I decided to give it a try once more and test some of the "big guns" (to see if they were good enough to pass the Validation process) - surprise, surprise!

  • Microsoft.com is giving TONS of errors, but they may pass - MS generally lives inside its own ecosystem.
  • SUN.COM is, like MS, a site full of crap, coded by people that don't care about Open Standards.
  • DELL.COM results in 143 Errors, maybe the guys at Dell aren't so knowledgeable about standards conforming websites?
  • Even GOOGLE.COM, an example of clean, compact, fast and efficient website, results on, uhm, let's see...30 Errors!!!
  • ADOBE.COM, THE contributors of a huge piece of the actual web - 7 errors.

And the list goes on and on...For me this is simply incredible! Who'd ever thought of that? These popular site don't give a nothing about "Standards Compliant Web Site".

If the "big guns" don't care about it, why should I?

My only consolation is www.sitepoint.com they've achieved only ONE error, and they don't even sacrifice one bit of information, offering RICH content and 99.9% compliance. Now that's the way web sites get done, and sooner or later I will try and best their result on mine (even if this means a complete rewrite of the template). I can get no... BTW, are we so sure W3C Validator is up to its task? Update 25/dec/2007: My new search does give the INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ORGANIZATION (http://www.iso.org), as a "Non Valid" web site! LOL! Even ISO don't care about web standards.

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