I really enjoyed Alan’s Best Quote (Today) About HTML. It was worth a laugh but it also got me thinking about the value of code validation. That is a concept that is at the forefront of my mind right now because I just re-designed my website and as I did so I made sure that it would validate as good XHTML. Ironically the only pages that did not pass as valid XHTML were my blogs because of some built-in numerical id tags – apparently id tags cannot be numerical to validate. One thing that I can say from going through that process is that getting your code to validate forces you to really think about what you are doing, how you are doing it and why you choose the things that you do. That is probably more valuable to me than the fact that I have validated code.
As for Microsoft, they don’t care to write good HTML, but where’s the incentive for them? I had to tweak my code after it validated to keep IE from displaying it incorrectly. Why write good code if you are busy supplying a browser that cannot interpret the code correctly?