Tuesday (11/15/05)
Standards and validation, what are they good for? 5:19 pm
Everybody’s always talking about standards and validation, but I think a lot of people don’t really understand what they are for. Many talk of standards and validation as if they are the same thing–and they’re really not.
Standards and validation were made for a reason, and that reason wasn’t bragging rights. A lot of people think just because their site validates and they have a cool little W3 button on their site they followed standards, and are hence better developers than those who’s sites don’t validate. They may have followed the rules of validation, but they may not have followed the idea of standards.
Here’s what the W3C says one of it’s main goals is:
The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C’s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.
Standards were created in order to ensure accessible, cross-browser sites. Standards were well thought out; but, of course, Microsoft didn’t want to follow them and along came IE. And because Microsoft hasn’t given IE a good update in years, things like opacity can’t be done on IE6 and below using standard CSS (as it can on newer browsers). But it does recognize non-”standard” code that does the same thing. Just put it in your CSS file, and wallah! Will it validate? No. But does it follow the idea behind standards?
Validation does one thing and only one thing: It checks your code to see if you followed the letter of the W3C’s rules. It’s a program. It’s not human, it’s not a designer or a developer, and it doesn’t know what you are trying to achieve. What do you think really follows standards: A site that looks ugly in IE because opacity isn’t supported (even though it validates), or a site that won’t pass validation but works great in every browser? Remember that the same effect is allowed in standards, but not all browsers except the same way of achieving it.
Validators are great for debugging and checking generally to make sure you followed the standards. If you’ve got weird bugs, run your site through a validator and chances are that’s your problem right there. But there are times when in order to truly follow standards you must intentionally break from the hold of validation. This is not an excuse for laziness with your code, it’s a call to follow the meaning behind the standards rather than the rules of validation. Because until the world is perfect and all browsers follow standards, you’re going to have to code around bad browsers.
Follow the rules of validation, and you can have a pretty good site. Follow the ideas of validation, and you’ll have an even better one.
I eat food. I listen to music. I sleep. Sometimes. I drink lots of coffee. I make pretty pictures. I talk to people. I believe in things. I write stuff. I take photographs. I have a laughing addiction. I am human. 
In my opinion, validation is only good for making sure you don’t have any errors like missing close tags and the like in your code. It’s far more important to write semantic (meaningful) coding instead.
I still think validation is a good practice. A web professional should always strive for validation since html isn’t exactly rocket science. Writing semantic markup is definitely most key, but something fishy is going on when you get over a few hundred errors.
I do however think it is a bit foolish to slap on those funny badges and yet still use table-based layouts. I just chuckle now since I’ve long argued that battle. Maybe they’ll learn, maybe they won’t. Life is too precious to care about someone elses riteousness over their standards-compliant table websites.
I’m not trying to say validation isn’t good, but I think the ideas behind it are much more important than the actual validation in itself. The W3C didn’t invent validation just for the sake of creating a new bandwagon, they created it to up the quality of the web.
I think too many people obsess over validation without really any reason except “that’s what your supposed to do.” They want there little badges so much that they’re sometimes willing to sacrifice cross-browser compliance with things like opacity, not really thinking of the reasons behind the standards.
Validation is definitely a good way to keep your code somewhat clean and generally follow standards, but I think there’s more to it than that.
That, I can definitely agree with.
I totally agree with you. I don’t think the validation tool as an implementation of semantic coding works well for its purpose. If people need to put up links to the w3 referer validation check to prove to the viewers that their site does indeed validate (which I don’t think anybody cares), the validation defeats its purpose. It’s more important to the web designer him/herself to maintain that level of consciousness.
[…] s non-javascript browsers to access certain otherwise non-accesible site-elements instead. Read the whole discussion here. […]
Standards, UUH… What are they good for? Absolutely nothing y’all… Sorry, I’m just surprised no one has done that yet.
Uh oh… Elliot… your going to get the camp all stirred up again.
I’m going to be doing the same in a few days (but with a different group). Sounds good though man. Love it when you write this kind of stuff. In the words of my friends the Spam bots
@Jake: Hahaha… You and your spam bots.
@ Jake & Elliot lol, Yah what are standards for, just don’t tell some people that
I’m all for standards, but I don’t think one can say that just ’cause his site validates he followed standards. And I don’t think one can say that just because his site doesn’t validate he didn’t follow standards. Validation is normally a good idea, but I think the idea behind standards should be the first concern.
Hello world
Thanks for the great post, I’ve cited your article on one of my own: Is Your Web Site’s Rank On Google Affected By Standards-Compliance?
Enjoy!
Hello world
Hello world