Home › Forums › CSS › Validation: It’s your cross browser compatability friend! › Re: Validation: It’s your cross browser compatability friend!
runaOkay, I see. It is not against wellformed code or the validator itself, it is against the validator as a detection tool to figure out why a page is rendered falsely in a browser.
@Falken After you tried do explain the world of markup to me you come the very same conclusion as I did: Validation is not perfect. May I repeat the first statement of this thread:
I do not agree with this advice. That is what I am talking about. The validator is not the right tool for checking why the browser does not render your markup the way you want him to do. Frankly, it is the wrong tool in every way. The validator informs you about the relation between your markup and the W3C standard, absolutely not about rendering problems in a browser. Validating has really nothing to do with parsing and rendering. Safari for instance does not parse and render the W3C standard. Safari renders Apple’s interpretation of text documents containing recommendations what the standard should be. So, you cannot learn to know the standard when watching how Safari displays your markup.
If you see a chaos in the browser preview, first check if a tag is not closed properly. Syntax highlighting in the editor, Firebug and a pair of human eyes is by far the better way to check this. But never ending divs that turn your page into disaster is what this thread is all about. If you re-read the first entry, valid code is not the thing we talk about.
Making the page run perfectly in all browsers is unlike validation. So the big four browsers won’t never support the role-attribute. It would be totally useless. Semantics are meaningless to normal browsers (except screen readers). What they want is syntax that fits to their built-in instructions to render elements. They don’t look up the Doctype spec and the DTD-file you have specified in your page header, they definitely do not validate a page, they have a set of tags hardcoded in their knowledge base. They may know to close forgotten tags when they read transitional, but what has this to do with the validator?
So, why validating? What does the validator do for the users of my site:
1. human beeings who see the content,
2. human beeings who listen to the content,
3. machines that try to understand the markup semantically (bots, screen readers, api),
4. machines, that only try to render the syntax of the markup (browsers)?
Every webdesigner should think about this with on his own. He should not listen to advices of people who have heard other people’s advices about the Validator. Asking the Validator why my xhtml-strict sucks in IE6? :D
Finally, let’s talk about beginners. Do you really want them to check their IE-rendring with the validator? Robskiwarrior really says nothing about standard-compliant code in his entry. Tthis is what the validator checks, incomplete tags are just one single point of the xhtml-standard which will be detected by coincidence. But Robskiwarrior talks about nothing else than rendering problems. My advice to beginners: Use your eyes or Firebug for browser-checking. Read the W3C specifications for learning well-formed code.
@Thedoc, I looked at the markup of your website and validated it with the validator. Are you really sure, that I am an idiot? Besides many other invalid things (and half-valid things that are worse that invalid ones), your pages has also most of the same problems I quoted recently. May be you want to mail to the W3C to inform them, that they are idiots too.
By the way: Why did you put "You’re an idiot" in quotation marks? The quotation marks are wrong.