While browsing through some of the projects that different groups and individuals have been working on so far in our class, I noticed that most of them are not currently validating with the standards. For starters, a DocType must be declared in order for the validator service to even know what to validate. This other site called htmlhelp.com is great for deciding which DocType is best for your application. I personally like to use the most up-to-date strictest standards, but I guess you could technically use other versions, or transitional versions.
One of the only plugins I use via Firefox browser is the Web Developer add-on. This add-on adds a small toolbar across the top of the browser window that allows for a huge variety of developing tools, including the abililty to validate any page you're on through the W3C validation service. By selecting the Tools menu and choosing the "Validate HTML" option, a new tab/window is opened that takes the current page you're on and checks it according the DocType declared.
To read more about Web standards, check out W3C's articles, including this one about the definition of my DocType preference, strict 1.0. Best of luck to everyone!
I did work with W3C validation in my google class. I can say it was a horrible experience, the reasons for that is the your web page would work fine but it would not validate, which is a big pane because you have to rethink how you made your html or other code. To me this is more like an MLA format for writing papers. They just want you to write the code in their way even though your code is pretty valid. That is why I hate this so much because I had lots of headaches to fix my code based on their standards.
ReplyDeleteIvo, the standards aren't set just so W3C has control of the way sites are setup, they are set so that developers can create websites that comply with modern browsers of today as well as the future browsers which companies develop based on these Web standards. It may be somewhat of a pain to validate your code, but just because it works in one or two different browsers, doesn't mean it will work in all of them, and it also doesn't guarantee any sort of compliance with future browsers. Not to mention, that by validating your code, you show your professionalism in coding and show that you know how to write code the correct way.
ReplyDeleteIf you spoke a language in anyway you wanted to without following any grammar or spelling rules, then you wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone else. While most modern Web browsers today can read even the messiest code, they all differ slightly, and if your code isn't valid, they may display it differently to different users, sending a different layout to them then you intended. Does that make sense?
I worked with that in my Google class as well and even though it was a headache, I enjoyed learning the proper way to code. I agree with you Matt, there are rules of language everyone spoken, and written. There would be way too much confusion if people talked and wrote however they wanted.
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