A Note on Validation

For the non-developers out there, validation means checking your code for errors. Theoretically, having no errors in your code means your website will work on all browsers. But it’s not that simple. This website uses valid HTML5 based on the W3C HTML Validation Tool. However the W3C CSS Validation Tool says our CSS doesn’t validate. And to be fair, it isn’t incorrect. The problem comes down to the nature of CSS and web browsers. Different browsers often take different code to accomplish the same thing. Things like drop shadows, rounded corners, and transparency are handled differently by different browsers and therefore are considered nonstandard. Anytime we use something like this in our code, it causes an error in the validation tool, yet displays perfectly fine in a web browser. We had to choose between a site with perfectly valid code and a site that looked and felt modern, and we chose the latter. This practice is generally recommended by web design professionals as well. As the linked article states, “So here’s the thing about validation: it’s a tool. Nothing more; nothing less; just a tool.”