Is Web (w3) Validation a Joke? Complexity vs Evolution?

Thanks to the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, we have an international standard to web development. The web is still very new, and for the past 17 years, the web has still been a mess. How can we standardize a globally collaborative network of web products? W3C has done a decent job. Far from perfect, but we needed somebody to step in. And because it’s so complex and always changing, we don’t have standards… (ha), we just have recommendations.

I often get in arguments about what’s right and wrong in web development practices. And from my experience, although I hate to admit it, sometimes just getting the damn thing to work, and look very pretty, is best practice. I’ve seen too many times where making things perfect (analysis paralysis) completely destroys a product for deployment.

If there’s one thing to follow, it would be W3C. W3C has a validation checker that tells you if you are following their recommendations. But this must be a joke? There are thousands of companies making millions where validation errors are meaningless.

I mean, wow! I can understand declaration types as HTML5 with errors. But even Amazon declared as HTML 4.01 Transitional has 531 Errors. Google (part of W3C), Yahoo (part of W3C)… error prone, but making more money than ever (Yahoo’s still there, trust me). Even Apple (part of W3C) has 2 errors declared as HTML5. All that aside, check out Microsoft (part of W3C)!

Microsoft must be sporting a PR team that tells them to be W3C compliant. But all-in-all, this is pretty much a joke. Everybody knows that 5, 10 years from now, all of us web developers will be facing new issues, most likely all around HTML5. Maybe even WebGL. Fact and Issue, make your website function, work well, across any browser, aesthetically beautiful, and you have a great website, even if you do break a couple rules.