validator.w3.org a total joke?

[Sleidia]

I'm having fun with their HTML "validator" which I think is a total joke :

http://validator.w3.org

I've tested well known sites such as Yahoo and Godaddy and others and for every site, the "validator" shows hundreds of errors.

Most of the time, lowercase tags are detected as errors which I find totally stupid.

Maybe someone could tell me if I miss something in my reasoning but I don't see why I should try to make my site error free when the biggest sites have ten times more errors than me.

 

[ChrisHirst]

then don't!

nobody else but you will care.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[feherke]

Hi

I think that is normal. Everywhere is difference between commercial and professional, not only on the web.

The world is ruled by the laws of physics, the web is ruled by standards and protocols. I am conforming to both : I do not piss against the wind and do not write invalid HTML code.

Of course, you are free to choose your way.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

why I should try to make my site error free when the biggest sites have ten times more errors than me

What a load of old tosh. That's like saying "Mike Tyson is a rapist - so it's OK for me to be one, too".

Just because some famous site does bad stuff coding-wise doesn't mean you should too. To do so only makes your site bad.

If you have any pride in your work at all, you'd care about your own site for the fact that you can, not because "other big sites" also validate.

Dan

Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

[/tt]

 

[Sleidia]

...
The world is ruled by the laws of physics, the web is ruled by standards and protocols. I am conforming to both : I do not piss against the wind and do not write invalid HTML code.
...

...
If you have any pride in your work at all, you'd care about your own site for the fact that you can, not because "other big sites" also validate.
...

Ok but, in what way lowercase tags make invalid code???
I don't want uppercase tags in my code and anyway, such a thing has no impact on the end user.

Example of stupid errors displayed :

Warning Line 79 column 36: cannot generate system identifier for general entity "A".
<span class="section">Wired News Q&A<span class="ra"> » </span>
An entity reference was found in the document, but there is no reference by that name defined. Often this is caused by misspelling the reference name, unencoded ampersands, or by leaving off the trailing semicolon (. The most common cause of this error is unencoded ampersands in URLs as described by the WDG in "Ampersands in URLs".
...

You see, it's totally flawed.

Lastly, I bet that totally W3c compliant sites are totally ugly.

 

[feherke]

Hi

in what way lowercase tags make invalid code???

Probably that was XHTML and there almost everything must be lowercase.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.2

Example of stupid errors displayed

The validator is right, that should be written as :

Wired News Q[red]&[/red]A

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_12

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[ChrisHirst]

nope YOUR code is flawed. The ampersand "&" is used as the start of a HTML entity (as in &nbsp; or &quot; ).
To use a "&" in HTML you should replace it with the entity &amp;

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[TamedTech]

It's not a difficult proceedure to bring your code up to compliance, if your code isnt compliant then it simply means you arn't coding it properly.

As for sites being ugly, thats a load of tosh, you can do anything using valid code that can be done with invalid code, its simply a case of whether you are doing it properly or bodging it together.

It's completely at your own descresion as to whether you want to write compliant code, I feel that if my code isnt compliant then i'm probably not doing my job properly.

Like the other guys have said, if the validator is kicking up a fuss its purly because your code is incorrect, it has nothing to do with the validator being wrong.

Rob

 

[Sleidia]

...
As for sites being ugly, thats a load of tosh, you can do anything using valid code that can be done with invalid code, its simply a case of whether you are doing it properly or bodging it together.
...

Ok, maybe but, I highly doubt that big websites ( in terms of pages number ) can realisticly be totally compliant.

Can someone here post links of nice and well featured sites that are 100% compliant?

All the ones I've seen so far are made of less than 10 pages and could have been designed by 10 y.o kids

 

[feherke]

Hi

Can someone here post links of nice and well featured sites that are 100% compliant?

What about

http://www.csszengarden.com/

?

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[Sleidia]

Sorry but, although the designs are great, this site has little content, is very small (most links are for external sites) and has little features to offer to its users.

I'm just trying to show that it would be impossible for fully featured sites to be 100% compliant.

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

Or our site, Coedit Limited:

http://www.coedit.co.uk/

Dan

Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

[/tt]

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

I'm just trying to show that it would be impossible for fully featured sites to be 100% compliant.

No you are not. You are asking us to prove you wrong by finding you a big site that is compliant. That is very different from showing that "fully featured" sites can not be compliant - because they can - you just have to accept that.

OK - not every one will be, but that in no way means that they could not be.

Dan

Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

[tt]Dan's Page [blue]@[/blue] Code Couch

http://www.codecouch.com/dan/

[/tt]

 

[feherke]

Hi

Of course there are standard compliant sites with a lot of content too, like

http://www.fsf.org/

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[TamedTech]

Yes, most large sites are dynamicly driven for a database, it is marginly more difficult to have them compliant, but provided your base templates are compliant you can grow your site to a very large scale without to many validation issue.

Bare in mind that many sites that are extremely large now have been around for some time and the WC3 standards have only recently come into the lime light.

As far as large scale sites are concerned, some are most definatly compliant to a large degree, i mean take a look as

http://www.dabs.com/

this site is exceptionaly good, they are compliant in all three areas, XHTML, CSS and WAI ... and believe me, this is an exceptionaly large site.

Rob

 

[Sleidia]

Now I'm convinced

Thanks

 

[Foamcow]

Didn't I have a long post in here about coding to web standards?!

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[TamedTech]

I've not seen it Cow. Maybe you weren't compliant with board rules and had it removed lol

Rob

 

[Foamcow]

Nah, it was a nice informative post explaining why W3C standards exist and what they mean. Maybe I forgot to actually hit "post" or something. Oh well.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2