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Print at May 20, 2013 9:25:58 AM

Posted by LSW at Aug 21, 2005 8:12:05 AM

Validation: enjoy with care
Validation: enjoy with care

Now you all know me, most every critique starts with "Try Validating your pages".

It is one of the first tests I do, then I see errors and... well if the designer is experienced and has a few errors, ok. If new fine as well, if experienced and has dozens, then they labeled as poor developers.

Guess what, my shoe really needs ketchup and a pinch of salt.

I added a CMS to my sites recently, I validated and all passed. Now couple months later and a few blog entries later, I eat my shoes so to speak.

In a recent thread at ComputerArts, a somewhat experienced designer asked about a site and I ad a few raised the Validation Flag. We sold him on it. Then had trouble with it and we helped. Well he got bored and began surfing and running sites through the W3C validator. Big sites first, things like Google and CNN, BBC etc. then switched to sites of the people posting... none passed. Well mine did of course, or didn?t it? So off to the validator and ... LSW 29 errors, DSD 19 errors, I began fixing them and LSW now has 34 errors! d oh

I got a wake up call.

That got me defending myself and lead to this thread, to tell you what I learned today.

Is Validation important? Yes, I think so. Many argue that it is not important as long as the site looks good. Well consider these things:

Validation will help you learn, point out mistakes you did not know. In this case he was placing block level elements, , inside of inline elements . That is clearly wrong, but many of you may do it.
Validation finds mistakes. But you your site looks good eve with mistakes? Yea, in a browser. But many people use screen readers, text browsers, PDA?s and Cell phones as well as other possible user agents. They may react differently to mistakes, they may break your site so it is unusable. Validation helps you be sure your site should work in all user agents. So Validation is important to accessibility.
Like programming, a problem is your site does not necessarily happen where you see it. many times the problem is lines before and only seen when it effects something else. So often many major problem you have may vanish if you validate and fix a problem earlier in the page. Re-validate and suddenly lots of errors are gone.
Validation helps clear embarrassing mistakes that make you look unprofessional.

But... be aware.

Validation is also the easiest thing to screw up in a web site.

Use a template? Make a validation error on your template and you site now has dozens of errors.
Use a Blog? Let one single visitor enter comments and likely your validation is shot for that page at least.
Does anyone else have access to the pages? Forget validation, workers using a CMS can easily add mistakes, in my Gov. site a unemployed Java Programmer with little web knowledge was hired to maintain it and built in validation errors three days after starting, it has not validated since.
The best of us make mistakes, so errors are easy to put in.
Change DOCTYPEs and it no longer validates.
Input added to a Database for dynamic pages by anyone other than you can add validation errors.

In my case, the editor that is use in my CMS when I add a Blog entry adds paragraphs in it's own way I have yet to figure out. I was adding my own tags and the result was my tags and text were landing in it?s tags causing a error, you cannot have nested in . So all my Blog entries have a error on each Paragraph, LSW has more and longer entries so more errors. Clearly I ate dirt with my idea that validation errors shows if a designer is worth their weight or not. I would likely say I was a wannabe...

So by all means, validate all your pages before you go live. By all means Validate every single time and immediately after you make even the smallest changes! But most off all, hold validation against yourselves and not others or you will be eating your shoe with me, so my shoe is down, now I need a little Mayo so I can eat the rest of my Foot.

PS - it is a real bugger to fix all my Blog entries, so i will just have to see what I can do later to ensure later blogs are correct, besides LSW is being redesigned so I will likely just leave it.

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May 20, 2013 9:25:58 AM