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<!--#set var="revision" value="\$Id: why.html,v 1.8 2004-07-21 15:07:10 link Exp $"
--><!--#set var="date" value="\$Date: 2004-07-21 15:07:10 $"
--><!--#set var="title" value="Why Validate?"
--><!--#set var="relroot" value="../"
--><!--#include virtual="../header.html" -->
<div id="skip" class="colophon">
<h2>Why Validate?</h2>
<p>
This document attempts to answer the questions many people have
regarding <em>why</em> they should bother with Validating their
web sites and tries to dispel a few common myths.
</p>
<p>
The original version was written by
<a href="http://www.webthing.com/~nick/">Nick Kew</a> of
<a href="http://www.webthing.com/">WebÞing Ltd.</a> for their
<a href="http://valet.webthing.com/">Site Valet</a> service and he has
generously donated it for our use. This version has been slightly
modified, but is essentially the same.
</p>
</div>
<div class="intro">
<h3>What is Validation?</h3>
<p>
Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal
Standard, such as those published by the
<a href="http://www.w3.org/">World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)</a>
for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the
<a href="http://www.wapforum.org/">WapForum</a> for WML, etc. It
serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar
and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those
processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine
languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.
</p>
<p>
It is important to note that validation has a very precise meaning.
Unfortunately the issue is confused by the fact that some products
falsely claim to "validate", whilst in fact applying an arbitrary
selection of tests that are not derived from any standard. Such
tools may be genuinely useful, but should be used alongside true
validation, not in place of it.
</p>
</div>
<div>
<h3>Why Validate?</h3>
<p>
Well, firstly there is the very practical issue that non-valid
pages are (by definition) relying on error-correction by a
browser. This error correction can and does vary radically
across different browsers and versions, so that many authors
who unwittingly relied on the quirks of Netscape 1.1 suddenly
found their pages appeared totally blank in Netscape 2.0.
Whilst Internet Explorer initially set out to be bug-compatible
with Netscape, it too has moved towards standards compliance in
later releases. Other browsers differ further.
</p>
<p>
The three questions below deal with three different points of
view on the issue of Validation.
</p>
<dl>
<dt>The novice (or non-technical website owner) question:</dt>
<dd>
<h4>"My site looks right and works fine - isn't that enough?"</h4>
<p>
The answer to this one is that markup languages are no more than
data formats. So a website doesn't look like anything at all!
It only takes on a visual appearance when it is presented by
your browser.
</p>
<p>
In practice, different browsers can and do display the same page
very differently. This is deliberate, and doesn't imply any kind
of browser bug. A term sometimes used for this is WYSINWOG -
What You See Is Not What Others Get (unless by coincidence).
It is indeed one of the principal strengths of the web, that
(for example) a visually impaired user can select very large print
or text-to-speech without a publisher having to go to the
trouble and expense of preparing a separate edition.
</p>
<p>
It is perhaps unfortunate that the best-known browsers - Netscape
Navigator and MS Internet Explorer on Windows - are visually very
similar indeed in their presentation of many documents, differing
only in trivial details like margins and spacings. The "same"
browser on a Mac or Unix/Linux display will often look far more
different.
</p>
</dd>
<dt>The perceptive observation</dt>
<dd>
<h4>"Lots of websites out there don't validate -
including household-name companies."</h4>
<p>
Do remember: household-name companies expect people to visit
<em>because of</em> the name and <em>in spite of</em>
dreadful websites. Can <em>you</em> afford that luxury?
</p>
<p>
Even if you can, do you want to risk being on the wrong side of a
lawsuit if your site proves inaccessible to - for instance - a
disabled person who cannot use a 'conventional' browser?
Accessibility is the law in many countries. Whilst validation
doesn't guarantee accessibility (there is no substitute for common
sense), it should be an important component of exercising "due
diligence". It is now just over a year since a court first
awarded damages to a blind user against the owners
of a website he found inaccessible (Maguire vs SOCOG, August 2000).
</p>
</dd>
<dt>The strawman argument</dt>
<dd>
<h4>"Validation means boring websites, and stifles creativity"</h4>
<p>
This is simply head-in-the-sand ignorance (indeed, it lies at the
heart of the most spectacular hype-filled dot-com failures).
Validation is fully compatible with a wide range of dynamic pages,
multimedia presentations, scripting and active content, etc. It
is part of the difference between doing it right and doing it
wrong in a dynamic multimedia presentation, just as much as in a
purely textual site.
</p>
<p>
It is perfectly in order for authors to express their creativity on
the Web, though it is of course generally more appropriate to some
sites (e.g. recreational ones) than to others (e.g. informational
or functional sites like this one). But authors with creative
ambitions should bear in mind that in any artistic field, you
<em>must</em> start with a thorough understanding
of the rules before breaking them. Otherwise you just look
foolish.
</p>
</dd>
</dl>
</div>
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