"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?
Let me give you a little insight on where I am coming from:
I'm from the old school, have been doing web sites since the early
90's. We never added a DOCTYPE tag at the beginning of our HTML pages
back then. All tags were in UPPERCASE and attribute values were always
in double quotes since " " renders faster than ' '. I still follow
these rules so my designs are backward compatible - just in case, and I
add a DOCTYPE tag.
I'm a loyal Netscape user. I've been using it since before IE and Opera
were even thought of. Netscape gives web designers an advantage not
found elsewhere. In older versions, the source code would BLINK
whenever an error in the code was found. Even today the source code is
color coded which is very convenient for debugging. And if you ever
need to grab an entire page with all its images and stylesheets, it can
be accomplished in a matter of seconds. So basically the browser gives
you ways to validate all the code. I do though double check all designs
in IE.
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.
There are 3 DOCTYPE tags available:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
There really isn't any help available on your site to describe the
differences. It is obvious that the 3rd one deals with frames, but the
1st and 2nd seem identical to me.
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.
--
Thank you,
Rick Horvath
President - Noodleware Software Co.
tel: 631-321-9776
Custom Designed Web Sites to fit any budget
E-Commerce Solutions
http://www.noodleware.com