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Thread: Validation: enjoy with care
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Thread Status: Active Thread Type: Sticky Thread Total posts in this thread: 7
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
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!  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:
But... be aware. Validation is also the easiest thing to screw up in a web site.
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 <p> tags and the result was my <p> tags and text were landing in it?s <p> tags causing a error, you cannot have <p> nested in <p>. 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. ---------------------------------------- [Edit 2 times, last edit by LSW at Aug 21, 2005 8:15:00 AM] |
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Les
Advanced Member Joined: May 9, 2004 Post Count: 640 Status: Offline |
Nice post LSW,  something to think about---------------------------------------- Tomorrow never comes, make the most of today |
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rodhurt
Stranger Joined: Aug 24, 2005 Post Count: 1 Status: Offline |
Nice. Post. I'm reading a Jeffrey Zeldman book called: "Designing with web standards", and it's great. It's really a good book for every one tha wants to start to work with webstandards. Zeldman also have a on-line magazine (A LIST A PART). The links are: A list a part http://www.alistapart.com/ Happy Cog (Zeldman's company) http://www.happycog.com/ I like this too: http://www.w3schools.com/ That are my bests links for now. |
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admin
Advanced Member Joined: Jun 14, 2003 Post Count: 2940 Status: Offline |
It does have its merits, but the book is packed with filler and fluff - he spends most of the time detailing about things that don't work, instead of just getting to the point on how to make things work. He also gives you the history of how the old browsers (that no one uses) didn't work with CSS. If this aspect of the book discussed theoretical positions, it might have some use ... I suppose. Unfortunately for the tress that were killed to make the paper for this book, the history discussed is that of broken tools (browsers) and has absolutely no use whatsoever in practical web design. I doubt carpenters care very much about the early electric saws and their problems... There are much better books on CSS out there. CSS book reviews ---------------------------------------- Stefan Mischook Video Tutorial Store | Web Templates |
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dawg
Advanced Member Joined: Jan 7, 2005 Post Count: 340 Status: Offline |
@ LSW I too have seen some of the things you mentioned. Recently when checking a blog I found on <p> tag that gave me one error. Now I have four different blogs that I personally write in with a few ghost writers and chasing down one <p> tag is just rediculous to me. The blog is much like a cms as it is not static so looking for this one error is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I also have several CMS that each get twenty plus entries a day and I have not even bothered to check them for validation. However the vast majority of people could actually care less if something validates. You can have a site that is ugly and it will validate and ther are nice designs that will not validate. 99.9% of the internet audience would prefer to view a site with good content and a nice design to an ugly site that validates. Rarely do I check a site for validation anymore, I use to, but it seems a waste now. If it displays right and functions right that is all I really care, not if validation says I have some p tag that is an error. Checking one of the blogs now I came back with two errors # Error Line 251 column 3: end tag for element "p" which is not open. </p> The Validator found an end tag for the above element, but that element is not currently open. This is often caused by a leftover end tag from an element that was removed during editing, or by an implicitly closed element (if you have an error related to an element being used where it is not allowed, this is almost certainly the case). In the latter case this error will disappear as soon as you fix the original problem. If this error occured in a script section of your document, you should probably read this FAQ entry. ? # Error Line 264 column 3: end tag for element "p" which is not open. </p> Now I guess I could find these but it is not as simple as copying and pasting the page to my editor, yeah this works ok for static pages but for a blog /database with many entries is not worth the effort. IMO ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by dawg at Oct 12, 2005 2:31:30 PM] |
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LSW
Advanced Member USA Joined: Nov 27, 2003 Post Count: 6285 Status: Offline |
In my case, when I set the CMS to limit the news entry on the main page to a certain number of words as a teaser, it chops off the closing </p> as well, shooting validation. If I allow the full text to show, then the </p> is there. Maybe this is the same sort of problem you are having? |
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dawg
Advanced Member Joined: Jan 7, 2005 Post Count: 340 Status: Offline |
Actually without casting blame, ok i will cast blame, I think it is the ghost writers I have as I have had a hard time teaching them to edit properly!!!!!!  |
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