Posted by Albert Wiersch on 10/18/06 20:51

"Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:4pnhi1Fit9uhU1@individual.net...
>>
>> I don't see how that makes sense. I think a better analogy would be:
>> "That's like saying toothbrushes are great tools that should always be
>> used but they're not perfect because they can't guarantee that all plaque
>> was removed and that your mouth is perfectly clean."
>
> No, because while plaque removal is one of the goals of brushing one's
> teeth, the features whose absence you consider to be imperfections in
> the validators have nothing to do with validation. "Validation", no
> matter how many times you say otherwise, has a specific definition in
> this context because it's defined in the specification by virtue of
> which this context even exists. The information provided by your tool,
> no matter how useful it may be, falls outside of the purview of
> validation.

Well, it depends on your definition of validation and why people validate...
MOST people validate because they are writing HTML and XHTML to be viewed
with browsers by visitors who come to their site. One of the purposes of
validating is to help make sure their documents do not contain issues that
would affect their visitors and negatively affect how their page could be
displayed. They want their site to display as intended. So how can you say
that validation is not intended to make sure that a document has some level
of correctness which carries over to actually displaying the document in a
browser?

If you are only creating documents so that they "validate" according to an
SGML validator (or dare I say HTML Validator) and you could care less about
how the pages actually display, then I suppose what you say makes sense. But
most people write and validate pages to be seen by real-world browsers. They
don't validate only to pass a strict "test". There's a purpose to validation
which carries over to displaying pages correctly in browsers.

Albert

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