The Two Great Things About Validation
Jens O. Meiert, January 30, 2009.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
There are two great things about validation: Validating supports and accelerates learning, so it contributes to awareness of respective specifications, and releasing formally valid code is a sign of professionalism.
Put another way, developers not validating most likely learn slower, and invalid code can in truly the most cases be considered unprofessional.
However, invalid code doesn’t have to mean inaccessible or unmaintainable code. That’s a myth. You can inverse that statement too though: Valid code does not – by far not – mean accessible or maintainable code, or even efficient yet fast code. The guys stating that are wrong or having different motives, as the advantages and great things about validation are, see above.
From my comment on Valid sites work better (?).
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Comments
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On January 30, 2009, 14:44 CET, olivier said:
Hi Jens,
it looks like our CMS ate your comment or something to that effect, I can’t see your comment in the (empty) pending queue. Can you resend?
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On January 30, 2009, 14:54 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Olivier, sure, I just submitted the comment again (twice, actually, the latter one fixing a broken link).
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On January 30, 2009, 17:34 CET, olivier said:
Published! Thanks Jens for your patience.
I find it a bit scary that comments migh be lost like that, though…
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On January 31, 2009, 6:24 CET, Jared Smith said:
Excellent post - and right to the point.
Replace “validation” with “alt text in HTML 5″ and you pretty much sum up my thoughts on that point also. Alt doesn’t make it accessible and missing alt doesn’t make it inaccessible, but having a guideline for implementing it educates, supports accessibility, and is professional.
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On February 2, 2009, 19:53 CET, Jens Meiert said:
Thanks, Olivier, Jared!
Regarding
@alt, Jared, yes, and without context that debate is philosophical
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On February 10, 2009, 12:43 CET, Richard Morton - Accessible Web Design said:
Although I would agree that invalid code doesn’t have to mean inaccessible or unmaintainable code, I would say that valid code is definitely easier to maintain.
The big link between accessibility and validation is that valid code should behave more predictably across different browsers than invalid code. Of course that is a utopian view as browsers don’t just treat invalid code differently.