I see your point re: image size and width but I'm sure there must be a way around this.
I too did not know anything about w3 dtd requirements until I submitted my site to a web design form for site critique. Some of the best designers around slammed me for not getting my pages to validate.
Apparently this will have consequences in coming years as XHMTL takes over and other sites attempt to interact with yours. Also, future browsers may break if you do not have valid DTD and encoding.
I actually then went ahead and cleaned up the code and it actually helped my pages and made them more browser friendly. I felt better about it afterwards. This is one of the critiques I got which hurt at first but pulled me right:
Yes. :) There may be other impressions, but if the site doesn't
validate, then the CSS probably doesn't work as expected, and any
Javascript will also have problems, due to the lack of a properly formed
DOM parse tree. If we /do/ find problems with the site (as opposed to
fuzzy impressions of the /visual/ design, which is only one part) if the
site isn't valid, it isn't worth our time to try to figure out why or
how the poster could fix them.
> If, after doing this and seeing it fail, do we completely dismiss the site
> as not worthy of our attention?
Until such a time as the site becomes valid, yeah. Like I said, it's not
worth our time to dig deeper if they haven't taken the time to make the
site using valid markup and/or CSS. Once they've gone back and fixed the
site, then yeah, any feedback is appropriate. Until then, though, there's
simply no sense feeding back because we have no idea whether we're seeing
the site as the designer intended, and so can't really give useful critique.
> Does this list (and the greater community) now hold validation on a pedestal
> higher then other concerns of our profession (as Jason asks 'look, feel and
> functionality' and I'd add adaptability, accessibility & page weight)
No, not a pedestal at all. A foundation.
I guess we'd better settle this, eh? A house divided cannot stand, and
all that.
Validation, the use of CSS, the attempt at a table-free layout, and
other things are what signals to us that the designer/developer has done
their homework, that they have endeavored to produce a site that will
work on any browser, that any bugs that crop up may well be bugs in the
/browser/ we're using rather than in the site itself. Without that good
faith effort, chasing down bugs in a ill-founded site is a waste of our
time and the designers' time, because the site stands on no solid
ground.
Sure, we can give visual design critiques. If the designer just says
"hey, how do you like this design?" they may as well post a screenshot
from Photoshop. It will have little to no relation to the actual site,
it is just a pretty picture. Markup and CSS, IMHO, is where any site
design should begin and end.
Steve,
can't wait for /this/ thread to play out...
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Book publishing is second only to furniture delivery in slowness. -b. schneier
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royland wrote:
