Much ado about Web Standards
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on February 24, 2005 at 10:31 PM
With the announcement of a new Common Look and Feel for UW web pages came a solid week of presentations. There was a lot of talk about web standards and, look at that, the current UW web developers page didn’t validate. Funny enough, I forgot to add some quotes on some links that appear from parsing RSS with PHP. When validating the page it didn’t tell me the exact problem though but it helped narrow down the problem by spitting out errors about one part of the page. A little forward slash and a quote into my PHP and all is good again. See, you can’t have it valid all the time ;) but it is fun to try.
So lets talk standards, Mike Davidson has a nice mention about why his site is not valid. He makes a good point, read it.
It is good to strive for standards and do your best to follow them, but please, please, please do not put a “valid XHTML 1.0 strict or whatever code” on your web site. It will soon be as passe as “best viewed in” – save yourself from the web page mullet.
What does have to do about UW’s CLF?
Well the template you get (yes I will post it today), starts off with standard code but the CSS, the CSS does not validate.update: now it does validate! Do I get worried about it? Nope. Is it the end of the world? Nope. Why is it still invalid, don’t you know better you muppet (favorite Brit term of the moment)? Suppose I do and I am not going to justify my lack of valid code with anything other than I just am not that bothered to track down what is the cause of the problem, 1.0 had to be made public and the site works in IE, Firefox, etc. I would prefer to spend my time helping move things along. When time allows I will revisit the problem.
Make sense? Btw, if you figure out how to get that CSS to validate I will give you a cookie ;)