Saturday, January 24, 2009
Validating
It seems to be more of a trend now days to have “valid” HTML and CSS coded websites, and that is only “validated” by a computer generated script that seems to change it’s mind everyday. I’m talking of course about http://validator.w3.org/.
While working on my new layout for ichabod1799.net (which I completed the other day, finally) and tidying the site up, I wanted to also tidy up the coding. I basically re-learnt in a matter of one tutorial what took me 5 years to learn in the first place. Surely now I have a much better understanding of it all which makes it easier to fix problems and get a more professional look, but apparently there’s more to it than what you can physically see on a screen.
I check to see if it’s all working myself by cross checking in six different browsers, and any errors that come up in one browser I either know how to fix, find away around it or do something different that will work. But then when I go to this validating site, it tells me that there is 138 errors.
I have a better understanding of my coding now, I know what I’m doing, the site couldn’t be neater, the coding couldn’t be more working yet some robot has told me that it’s not valid, though with my own eyes and 6 different browsers, it works for me.
What gets more stupid with this site is that it seems to change it’s mind everyday. One day it would be 150 errors, though I have made no changes to the layout what so ever. Then it has it’s features, like validating different types of HTML, 1.0, 4.1 27.47854 whatever. Though automatically it says 138 errors, but if I select HTML 4.0 the errors are reduced to 15.
Then there’s the tidy up feature and when you use “their suggested code” it totally fucks up two months work.
When was this web design hobby such a headache? When are hobbies suppose to be so stressful? I’m not going to care anymore. Hopefully I can reduce my errors as time goes by and I get more experience. But at the moment I’m proud to say that the new Ichabod1799 is mostly invalid HTML.
I feel your pain, woody. =(
They started to become complicated when we started to take them seriously. =)
I get into a couple of debates at the daniweb forum because someone is such an advocate of: validate your code, do not use tables, do not use watermarks, do not use javascript except to compute, etc. You’d think we’re all blind and they invented CSS so we could make perfectly aligned black and white boxes of text!
BTW: The changing number of errors could be from external js scripts or the usual culprit & character which always messes up things for me. Or perhaps using the “” for your html attributes…? (If I have a link pointing to something.com/?page=a&sort=asc the & comes up as one error… =|) I’m into reading about all of this stuff and it depresses me too sometimes but I suppose we have to do it or forever be persecuted for forgetting to close a br tag…
That’s the other thing, fucken Br tags. at first just < b r > wasn’t validated, but I learnt that dreamweaver automatically puts in < br /> at that seemed valid for a while but now it’s not anymore and they’ve gone back to saying < b r > is valid
Eh? The br tag is valid again? Maybe it’s just for HTML4 and below…
Hi just poping by and can see you are making a new blog layout
If you need any help and you think I can then just let me know…