In article <
timstreater-CD8B...@news.individual.net>,
Tim Streater <
timst...@greenbee.net> wrote:
> ... A validator is
> just one person's idea of what is correct HTML.
Hardly, it is just a wee bit more social than that in that HTML rules
and doctypes are written with a fair amount of consultation. Maybe not
as much as you would like but the point remains that it is more than
one person's idea.
> If you want to check
> what you have, then use a *browser*. Browsers define what is correct
> HTML, because they *ship code*. And they're written by teams of people,
> not some smart alec with a bee in his bonnet.
>
er... where do you think browser makers get their raw materials, they
don't get it by magic or simply invent it. They surely pore over stuff
like that at
<
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/>
and
<
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/>
and more modern too.
As is evident below, you are less interested in websites for the
public at large all over the world than narrower concerns for certain
groups. It makes quite a bit of sense to use validators as a baseline
for website development and then to check for browsers that vary from
the main interpretations. They may have good or bad reasons for
varying; good sometimes because of serious unclarity in the rules or
because the rules are too unintuitive, bad because of inattention to
them or ignorance. Sometimes browser makers really do go their own way
rather a lot - guess - and cause great trouble to us all.
> Because my stuff is an app and not a website, I get to decide what
> browser the user will run (Safari 6, in fact). However, sometimes I
> modify the app to run a different browser and look at their error
> consoles just to check whether I haven't made any HTML errors. Safari is
> very forgiving and doesn't appear to bother to flag HTML errors, but in
> iCab and Firefox, for example, the error console and/or browser itself
> will tell you whether your page is correct. I also check with Opera and
> Chrome. There is no Internet Explorer so evidently I don't bother with
> that one.
>
> In short, stop farting about with a validator and use a browser instead
> if you're that bothered.
By checking validators as a penultimate step (before looking at
browser implementations), website developers (for the world at large),
on the contrary, you can stop a lot of messing about.
--
dorayme