For those of you who do web design or the odd web work, you may have heard of the world wide web consortium (W3C). They are the standards body that is responsible for the HTML and XHTML specifications.
One of the challenges of doing web design is ensuring that your designs work on multiple browsers and operating systems. One of the ways to help with that is to make sure that your website actually conforms to W3C standards, and properly validates against a real parser. Unfortunately, very few web sites these days actually validate, even amongst people who really should understood the importance of validation.
Out of all the themes I’ve created, this is the only one on this website that has validated against W3C. To be honest, had it not been for the jedi-like teachings of Dale Mugford, I’d probably still be in non-validating HTML hell. But going from non-validating to validating really didn’t take that much time, and it’s made me approach web design and development from a new (and proper) angle.
I went around the internet tonight and checked most of my friends websites and those of influential Vancouver technology people. Unfortunately, nearly every single site failed miserably, often displaying hundreds of errors. I don’t want to single out any particular websites, but I encourage everyone to check their own site using the W3C validator to see for themselves.
Since Vancouver contains some of the brightest most influential minds in the web world, I’d like to lay down the gauntlet for everyone to clean up their websites and make them properly validate. I’m more than happy to guide anyone who wants help in this area, but I think it would be rather impressive if the majority of the Vancouver web community could lead by example in this area.
If your site does validate (or doesn’t) let people know in the comments. Feel free to bash a few of your peers to get them to join the competition :) As I said, I’m more than willing to help anyone out if they need some guidance in this area.
Maybe when it’s done we can all get together and celebrate at a pub. I’m more than happy to buy the first few pitchers, but only people who have validating websites can attend the party.
And a lot of the time, it’s all the bells n whistles in the sidebar that causes a huge ton of errors. But I have seen some pretty bad coding on pages that should have been easy to validate to strict standards.
I’ll give extra props to you for not even mentioning IE. :D
I keep meaning to go over my site and fix the XHTML issues. Perhaps over the next little bit I’ll do that. My non-wordpress sites are XHTML STRICT valid I believe.
My blog appears to have 45 errors and 3 warnings!
My favourite error was “end tag for “p” omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified,” because OMITTAG sounds like it should be a variant of OMG! Um, perhaps I may have to take you up on your offer to help clean this mess up!
Fixed! After a bit of plugin hacking, CSS fu and with the help of the Tidy Up! WordPress plugin, my blog validates 100%, [XHTML 1.1 and CSS3]