Re: Does it matter anymore?

Carlos Narváez wrote:

> Given these results of some of the heavy hitters on the web today, how
> important is HTML validity and/or this tool?

Valid HTML is part of a quality assurance process. Creating sites that 
adhere to the spec should guarantee reasonable consistency across all 
user agents that also conform to the spec. If certain companies (be they 
"heavy hitters" or not) don't think that QA of their markup is of great 
concern, that's up to them to deal with. From my own experience, invalid 
HTML often gives rise to bizarre behaviour in certain browsers when it 
comes to styling via CSS. Rather than spend more time trying to find CSS 
workarounds or further kludges to markup, I usually find that fixing the 
actual HTML in the first place yields far more predictable results. So, 
for my own QA, valid code is an important first step upon which to 
build. If Amazon and co. think different, that's frankly up to them.

As for "does it matter anymore?", that's again up to the individual 
developers. As the W3C is not an enforcement agency, I'd say it's 
irrelevant how many sites do or don't validate. Consider, though, that 
as a general trend, HTML code seems to align more and more towards spec 
even on large sites (due in no small part to development/design tools 
slowly coming around to outputting valid, or at least reasonable, code). 
Without a baseline specification to work towards, we'd be left with a 
myriad of completely incompatible implementations and "best viewed with 
IE" type sites.

IMHO, of course...

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Received on Sunday, 21 October 2007 16:52:46 UTC