Posted by Andy Dingley on 02/02/07 09:32

On 1 Feb, 19:28, "newspost2000" <newspost2...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> I am a web developer and I am working with a
> Content Manager...

I do wonder why a "content manager" even needs to care. Shouldn't they
be worrying about content, and having a CMS take care of the
implementation details like this?

> I am trying to convince him why he should validate
> all of the html code that he writes

The W3C list is a good starting point.

HTML / CSS design is hard. It's hard to make it work correctly when
it's valid, even though it's quite well defined how the tools and
browsers ought to behave. In contrast it's _not_ defined how they
should behave with invalid code, so it's even harder to make things
work this way. Valid code is an objective standard starting point for
worrying about rendering.


> He feels that if his pages render as he would
> expect through Firefox and IE, even if there are some missing closing
> tags or deprecated tags... that at least the browsers are forgiving

They're forgiving, but not predictably forgiving. In many (most?)
cases, they both have correct and identical behaviours with valid
code, but varying error corrections after error. How can he possibly
have _both_ "render as expected" in this case?

> He feels that
> validating the code will actually slow down his development

Valid code is faster to author and deploy. Testing validity is a
simple and objective test, easily carried out automatically. User
testing under a variety of browsers is anything but.

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