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These nice web page validation icons are displayed e.g. on my main index page. A successful validation means that the respective page consists of formally correct HTML and CSS. Very simplified, HTML and CSS are formatting languages which my whole website (any many others) has been written in. What is the deal about that? What is the use of validation? What is the point of those icons?
HTML is some sort of computer language. Just like in a natural language (e.g. English), there is a grammar, although the grammar of a computer languages normally is defined much more in detail. E.g. English relies heavily on the subject-predicate-object structure because this order determines what word plays which role. Consider the sentence "barking run the Joe dog after". Quite obviously, the sentence is grammatically wrong. There are at least four versions to correct it:
All of them are grammatically correct, but their meaning differs. Sentences 3/4 are probably nonsense even if they are grammatically correct. The first two do make sense, but there is a huge difference in the meaning, most notably for Joe. Had the sentence been built in a correct grammar, then the reader would not have to guess what the sentence is about.
When a browser encounters erroneous HTML code, it will try to guess what the author might have meant. As you can see in the example above, this can go wrong, especially because most browsers will not be intelligent enough to rule out the sentences 3 and 4 as nonsense. Maybe a browser will get it, maybe not. Another browser or even a future version of the same browser might guess something completely different. So it is really irrelevant whether the Internet Explorer displays some piece of erroneous code correctly.
It will even become worse if some authors try to "optimise" their pages for the IE, i.e. they write their bad code in such a way that at least the IE can make some sense out of the data garbage. This makes users shift to the IE, thinking that other browsers "are no good" - instead of alerting the author of his responsibility. This has brought about the Microsoft monopole. I myself do not have any Microsoft products on my computer, I would not even use them if I got them for free. As web author, I do not "optimise" my pages for the IE since I want every browser to be able to display my pages instead of supporting Microsoft. On the other hand, if some browser is so buggy that it fails even to display correct HTML code, then I will not care. Users concerned should update their software, or if this is not possible, they should change to other programs.
But if the code is correct, then the chance increases that also exotic or future browsers will display my pages reasonably - without any "optimisations". Many problems people blame the browser of actually are caused by bad HTML code. Writing correct code in the first place eliminates the need for work-arounds, so this will save time. Besides, also the web search engines will profit from corrcect code because their interpreters may get confused by erroneous HTML code. That will make the page harder to find which probably is not what the author had in mind when he published it. So I write code compliant to the formal rules, and I check this by using the free W3C validator. It is the W3C people who elaborate precise definitions of things like HTML.
These nice icons do not have any value for the normal user, of course. As long as the page displays reasonably, the user will not care about the quality of the HTML code. But I want to alert other web authors of the validation issue. Professional web designers should know this stuff since it is just a normal part of their work. If a professional violates the standard, then he will have good reasons to do so - it (hopefully) will not be due to carelessness. But hobby authors (like myself) often do not even know that validation exists. By the way, you cannot rely upon HTML editors. Quite contrarily, such software is likely to generate the worst code, so I use to write everything manually.
My page can be read even with Lynx, a text browser without mouse support; the images are replaced by their respective descriptions. If a page can be read with Lynx, then also special software for impaired people should be able to cope with it. That concerns accessibility which is more then just code validation. Valid code is a necessary precondition for accessibility, but it does not suffice: A page may consist of perfectly correct HTML and yet be unaccessable to blind people.
I do not really optimise my pages for accessibility, but I keep an eye on not putting obstacles in the way. That I drop colours is just due to asthetic reasons. But good contrast, avoiding blinking things, showing clearly what links are unread, read or aktive is also helpful to non-impaired people. I do use layout-tables, but they still make sense when linearised; my images always contain a description (using the alt-tag); font sizes are always relative and not absolute (and for the main index site, there is a text-only version because the images cannot be scaled); I set flash navigation, javascript etc. aside because for my web site, such gadgets would not only be useless but even exclude impaired people. Being unable to see is not being unable to think. So my point herein is to make other web authors have also such readers in mind. More about accessibility can be found on the W3C accessibility page. My website conforms to level A of their accessibility guidelines.
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