Re: http://validator.w3.org/ who came up with this site?

Rick Horvath wrote:
> /"The fact that some browsers support them (ERRORS IN CODE) is completely 
> irrelevant to the concept of validation. "/
> 
> So exactly what is the purpose of validation?

So exactly what is the porpoise of spill chequing a dokument?

> We never added a DOCTYPE tag at the beginning of our HTML pages back then.

These days, omitting the DOCTYPE will trigger quirks mode in browsers, 
meaning that they attempt to replicate the buggy, non-standard, parsing 
and rendering behaviours of obsolete browsers.

> All tags  were in UPPERCASE

That's fine, HTML is case insensitive, it's just a matter of style.

> and attribute values were always in double quotes since " " 
> renders faster than ' '.

I'm not aware of any browser that will render a document faster simply 
because you use double quotes instead of single quotes.

> I'm a loyal Netscape user. I've been using it since before IE and Opera were 
> even thought of...
> 
> As far as making a page search engine friendly, I have clients whose sites rank 
> very high and contain dozens of 'errors' according the validator.

As I tried to tell you previously, the abilities of browsers to make 
sense of your documents by using undefined error handling techniques has 
absolutely nothing to do with the concept of validation.

Tell me, why should it be up to the browser to handle your authoring 
mistakes, when it's easier for you to fix them before they even get 
there.  Since error handling is mostly undefined, browser have had to 
implement it by reverse engineering buggy browsers, and that means they 
do differ in their handling of some mistakes, sometimes in very 
significant ways.

For example, just take a look at the different ways in which Mozilla, 
Opera and IE handle invalid nesting of elements:
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1037910467&count=1

> There are 3 DOCTYPE tags available:
> ...
> 
> There really isn't any help available on your site to describe the differences. 

See the HTML 4 Recommendation.
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/

In particular, the index of elements lists the elements that are valid 
for each.  There are other differences, but knowing which elements are 
deprecated and which are not is one of the most important differences.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/elements.html

> If it is not for the fact of the browser displaying the code as intended, or for 
> a search engine to find the page - they *what is the need to have a validated 
> page?* The end user will never know! The search engines will never know!
> 
> Seems pointless to me.

Read these:
http://validator.w3.org/docs/why.html
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html

And, since your a Netscape fan, this one too:
http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/reasons

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Friday, 7 October 2005 01:18:34 UTC