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Re: Creating Valid Code

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From: John Foliot
Date: Sep 8, 2011 7:33PM

Ryan E. Benson wrote:
>
> I was asked to look at part of a site. Most of the pages had over 20
> validation errors. While the developer hasn't been creating sites for
> too long, my lead told me to essentially ignore them. He says
> non-valid code is kind of the standard these days "in the real world."
> I know a good amount of people on the list either work for large
> organizations/companies, is this just how it is or should I be pushing
> for valid code. I would be fine with the errors if they were under
> five or so, but 20 is little high for my blood.
>
> What do you guys think?

Hi Ryan,

Code validation, in-and-of-itself, may have very little impact on true
accessibility: I've seen web pages that passed all the technical
validation requirements and still turn out a bit of an accessibility mess,
and conversely I've seen pages that do not pass validation be highly
useable and accessible. It can also depend on which DTD (or lack of in
HTML5) you are validating against: for example any document in HTML4 or
XHTML1 that contains ARIA will not pass a mechanical validator, yet
removing ARIA to meet validation requirements seems something of a
backward step, don't you think?

As Birkir has suggested, the kinds of validation errors being presented
are generally more important than a sum-total of errors, and like most
other aspects of web accessibility it takes some reasoning to understand
the impact of validation versus non-validation. By practice, I use
validation reports today as something of my Canary in the Coal Mine - if
there are a large number of validation errors then I am fairly confident
that there will be accessibility issues as well, as it is usually
symptomatic of a big problem. However if all the errors are being
generated by, for example, un-escaped ampersands (&), then the real impact
on accessibility is pretty much negligible today (thanks to browser error
recovery).

So I think that the answer you seek is somewhere in the middle of what you
are thinking and what your boss might be suggesting. Best suggestion is
to examine the errors and see what type of errors are being generated, and
then make your evaluation based upon that. Don't get caught in a numbers
game, stay focused on real results and user-impacts. I challenge
developers to strive for validation (as achieving it means being focused
on attention to detail, which generally also means better accessibility -
but not always), but when it comes to evaluating 'success', validation has
a lower value in the greater picture: nice to have but not critical.

HTH

JF
===========================John  Foliot
Program Manager
Stanford Online Accessibility Program
http://soap.stanford.edu
Stanford University
Tel: 650-468-5785

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Co-chair - W3C HTML5 Accessibility Task Force (Media)
http://www.w3.org/WAI/PF/HTML/wiki/Main_Page

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