lord of web standards
For any web designer/developer, validation is one of the key services offered to clients for their websites. Clients want “clean” websites, they want them to look the same in every browser and they want it to be accessible for all their users. This is no bad thing, far from it. With so many browsers for a user to choose from, having a set of standards in place is the only way forward. The downside to this is that the browser developers can choose which standards they adopt and which ones they don’t fancy supporting. (I’m looking at you Microsoft!). This used to be a massive problem in the web development industry. Browsers like Internet Explorer 6 rendered pages so vastly different from it’s rivals that numerous style sheets had to be used for any kind of consistency. To make matters worse IE6 became the most widely used browser on the Internet. Standards were not followed (I mean.. what was the point if the main browser you’re making it for didn’t support them anyway) and developers had to spend many extra hours making sites IE6 compliant..
Things have improved a lot since those days. The appearance of Firefox and the way it followed most of the recommended W3C standards made it a personal favourite amongst web developers. It’s userbase has been (and continues) expanding on a daily basis as it battles Internet Explorer for web supremecy.
So standards made a comeback and developers started to properly adopt them. We still needed seperate style sheets for IE6 and lower. But even IE started to jump on the W3C bandwagon. IE 8 for example is by far the most standards compliant Microsoft browser ever. Seperate CSS for MS browsers will soon become a thing of the past once the old and decrepid IE6 is finally killed off (although this might still take some time).
Everyone’s using standards now then? Well, no. You might be surprised to find that some of the biggest and most visited sites in the UK fail any sort of W3C page validation. Let’s take one of my favourite sites, the BBC News site as an example. You would expect the BBC, with it’s massive budget, countless staff and it’s remit to public broadcasting to be a front runner in standards and accessibility. Well, despite it’s validation failings it still kind of is. The site looks the same in all the major browsers, is accessible to screen readers and is perfectly readable should CSS be disabled. Yet one validation check comes back with 470 errors and 33 warnings! Surely this site shouldn’t even be working with so many standards being broken? The BBC aren’t the only ones. Amazon.co.uk’s homepage comes back with a massive 1334 errors and 128 warnings and Yahoo’s UK site has 141 errors and 17 warnings. Amazingly, the MSN UK homepage validates perfectly (well done Microsoft).
It now comes back to the original question. If all these major sites can fail it so badly just how important is page validation?
It’s becoming less so. That’s not say that we should stop doing it. We should be very proud of the standards compliant sites We build. I take a lot of pride in seeing my pages pass the W3C test, but things are changing. Browsers are a LOT more forgiving these days. Missed a closing tag on a paragraph? Well it won’t validate but it will still render correctly in the latest browsers. It’s the same for images and linebreaks. They’ll all still show up ok but the W3C will fail your page.
We should all strive to make sure our websites follow the W3C guidelines. But for those of us that want to get experimental and try new things, then why not! If we all just followed the recommendations and never tried anything new then the internet would become pretty boring. It’s up to you how many browsers you support and validation is by no means a guage to how your site will display in them all. This site for instance does not support IE6 (my site, my choice) but it does follow all the W3C standards and validates. It also looks the same in all the major browsers. If I had to make it fail it’s validation to make it work in all browsers I would.
It’s becoming more of a personal choice, but clients will mostly demand it. By all means experiment, but know your standards as you will need them at some point.
Tags: blog, html, SEO, validation
