I have a Firefox extension called HTML validator that checks the HTML of websites using the W3C validation engine, and I have noticed that almost no high traffic site uses valid (x)HTML. Examples: Youtube, Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Actually, I haven't found one of Alexa's top 500 that uses valid HTML. Why is this?
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Why do so many popular websites not use valid (x)HTML?
- Thread starter MOD YOU UPP
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My company's site isn't valid XHTML. Nor are many of the web applications we sell. It ended up being a cost-benifit issue. The site worked fine in all major browsers even though it wasn't valid XHTML. It was determined that no benefit would be gained from trying to make it fully valid.
Major sites are hard to keep under control, and a lot of the content is generated on load by code written by Programmers, who in my experience have lousy syntax discipline. Not all, but a lot. PHP/Ruby is their specialty, not HTML.
Me personally, I hate when my code doesn't validate.
Me personally, I hate when my code doesn't validate.
If a site includes items from a third-party, like visitor tracking or ads, that site will probably not validate. Flash will also make it fail if you're not careful to embed with the right method. When validating a site, you have to look at the actual errors and determine whether it is something you can reasonably fix or not. Sometimes things are not under your control and you have to give up on the idea of true validation.
because having a site do what you want it to do, and work properly is different from having your website perform well under a benchmark. it's like running your system through 3dmark benchmarks: it will compare your system against other systems, and how well it can perform, but those results will be irrelevant if all you use your system for is web browsing and notepad/textedit.
You mean you don't like tags that are deprecated, half CAPS half not, laden with tables and completely unorganized?
Yeah, me neither.
You will find an overwhelming majority of the worlds English-speaking citizens cannot even articulate correct English, and you expect them to be able to write PHP which generates valid XHTML ?
The primary issue may be cost, that any fool with no training, can produce HTML. These fools rise to become IT managers who devise coding standards and guidelines after "reading it in books".
I've seen with my own eyes a yeam of 4 such "experts" take two years to produce a set of programming standards that amounted to 17 do's and don'ts, some conflicting with others, some from OO languages, some from procedural languages, all cherry-picked from a selection of programming and IT management books.
The primary issue may be cost, that any fool with no training, can produce HTML. These fools rise to become IT managers who devise coding standards and guidelines after "reading it in books".
I've seen with my own eyes a yeam of 4 such "experts" take two years to produce a set of programming standards that amounted to 17 do's and don'ts, some conflicting with others, some from OO languages, some from procedural languages, all cherry-picked from a selection of programming and IT management books.
I don't think that'll happen any time soon. What's the incentive? There's really no one in charge of web standards. The WWW Consortium is only suggestive of standards, they don't control anything. Browsers are more consistent in their interpretation of things like what padding and margins mean but I don't know of any effort to force people from using tables for layout, not embedding flash without using the Satay method and other stuff like that that usually causes validity issues.
Your second sentence should be: "I hate reading people's sloppy code".
As for me, I hate reading sloppy English.
I find a lot of the time the culprit is not the programmer, but text copied and pasted from Word into WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE. Ick.
But then, I'm OCD about syntax and semantics.
But then, I'm OCD about syntax and semantics.
Because they use different people to accomplish some coding segments and they have variations on the coding style, and also they have time deadlines to different projects, and they must reach them. And it doesnt matter if it's valid or not.
Personally i do like websites validation, i also code valid html, because it's a plus for my customers.
Personally i do like websites validation, i also code valid html, because it's a plus for my customers.