W3C Validator Upgraded to Face Reality
No longer treat missing DOCTYPE or Charset as a fatal error.
That quote (from the What's New page for the W3C validator, ends a long, long, long standing problem that many folks had with the validator: it only worked if you knew what you were doing.
If you knew how to write valid pages, with DOCTYPEs and character sets, then you could use the validator.
If you didn't, then the validator was of limited use.
Moreover, the validator was nearly useless to check the 93.7% of all websites that do not have DOCTYPEs declared. This meant using the other validator which was located at HTMLHELP, which was not bad, per se, but lacked one crucial element:
It was not integrated into Opera.
Opera has long been able to send a page to the validator by pressing control+alt+V (Windows) or alt+mac+V (Mac OS). But if the page you were on did not have a DOCTYPE, well then you were outta luck. This meant that the feature in Opera was less useful than it should have been, but more importantly the validator itself was less useful than it should have been.
Don't get me wrong, DOCTYPEs and charset declarations are important, but refusing to try and validate pages without them always seemed to me like a teacher who took your essay, looked at it, and tore it up and threw it away because you forgot to put your name and date at the top of the page. Strict? Sure, but did it really teach me anything?
Anyway, this is a good day for the web. I just wonder how many other folks are writing about this as the sign of the apocalypse.
(Hat tip to Tim Altman, Opera Insider to pointing this out to me.)
Comments
Ah, i have learned from your page http://tntluoma.com/beyond30/2004/05/w3c_validator_upgraded_to_face_reality that W3C validator is upgraded :)
Now, check that page with validator ;)
( just one error, and you actually did make a comment wether it would validate! )
:)
/Morgan
Posted by: Morgan Olsson | May 12, 2004 04:03 AM