Help Lower the Cost of CSS Validation
Jens O. Meiert, September 22, 2011 / September 27, 2011.
This entry is filed under Web Development.
Validation is a baseline quality attribute. I have emphasized this in the past and recently shared a bit more about the reasons and how you can use validation on Google’s Webmaster Central blog.
There are several things you can validate, way beyond HTML and CSS. Let’s stay with CSS: we know that HTML deserves special attention and with the rest we may or may not deal with at all.
So when all of us throw our CSS validation experience into one bucket, what do we get?
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The W3C validator (typically to be used with the “CSS level 3” profile) may or may not report any issues. We get that.
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If it does, some of the issues are false positives.
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Some of the issues are due to proprietary stuff like
zoomorfilter. -
Some of the issues are “real” issues.
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The impact of these issues varies, and may be relatively low assuming proper use of style sheets, especially if they are maintained centrally.
When we look at our current situation we may not want to conclude that there is no value in validating style sheets: it’s that the price for validating and catching real issues in a properly set up environment is rather high.
For CSS validation to become more useful the cost for it needs to go down: the noise generated by false positives and proprietary code will need to disappear.
In order to get there we need more developers reporting issues and contributing to the CSS validator code base. Please help.
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