dk01 — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 19:19:33 +0000

For those people who don't want to think of it in terms of code. Think of it in terms of cars. 30 years ago cars were simple and therefore easy to fix. If something went wrong my dad could fix our car without the help of a mechanic or even a manual sometimes. Nowadays cars are so complex that only trained professionals can deal with all the electrical circuits and special features. Is this a bad thing? No, it just means the consumer demanded to have more advanced features, and for that to happen the design of cars had to become more complex. Sure my Dad can't fix the car but now he has power windows, AC, and many other features.

If you take this example of the car and translate it to the progression of coding web standards we can see great features like AJAX (controversial, I know) and XML being formed on the premise that the document they are working with is valid.

Imagine trying to roll down your power window and having it turn on the AC instead! One simple crossed wire can do that! That's why we need to demand perfection in our industry and web standards/validation are the way to do that.

openmind — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 09:52:26 +0000

robbluther wrote: How do you get ColdFusion Code to validate?

You don't have to worry about CF as it's server side. You just need to make sure that the code it does output is valid. For example www.searchwebby is bot XHTML strict and driven by complex CF....

dragonsjaw — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 03:03:09 +0000

Nothing like ressurecting a post from 2004!!! I started reading from the beginning and lo and behold.. ran into posts from 'old timers' I haven't 'heard' from in awhile.
Funny that validation is still being questioned.

WesB86 — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 00:34:42 +0000

WEll...many thanks for all the help..my site is now 100% validated (putting the validate icon on all the pages in the next day or so) and I'll be working on the boring, conservative logo now...this forum is awesome.
Carrie (WesB86)
wescosales.com

steve40 — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 21:24:26 +0000

It gives you an excuse for those Bald spots. You can always blame them on pulling your hair out, while trying to validate your code.

Dux0r — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:56:51 +0000

A few reasons (off the top of my head) why valid code is good:

1. Your code will take up less space. Especially if you use CSS instead of style elements.

2. Your web pages will be future friendly (and easier to maintain).

3. Your web pages will be more cross-browser friendly, hence more people will be able to view your site as you intend.

4. Your web pages will be compatible with older browsers.

5. Your web pages will be more Search Engine friendly (yes, search engines DO care about valid code, most SE's see your web page just like Lynx browser which doesn't allow for any invalid HTML at all).

6. Your web pages will be able to be read by screen-readers and other disability-aimed programs and applications, hence more people will be able to view your web pages.

There are plenty more reasons, but I'm sure you can see that valid code IS important as well as moral.

Hope this answers your question =)

WesB86 — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 02:26:29 +0000

Megan,
Thanks my site is 99% validated. By tomorrow it will be 100%...this forum is beyond awesome and so helpful.
Carrie (WesB86)
wescosales.com

WesB86 — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:53:12 +0000

thanks so much i'll get right on it..i just love having the validation code on my pages and if i do it with css it will change all at once...that will be extremely nice...i'll get back with you and thanks again

Megan — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:44:21 +0000

Carrie - the first thing you need to do is put that background into your CSS rather than using the table attribute. So you'd have style="background: url('images/blueheader.jpg');" or a class for that table in your mystyles.css that would include that bit. Same with the valign="top" further down that's throwing a error.

It's also throwing errors on some of your ID's - ID's should only be used for unique items. That is, things that only appear once on the page. If they're used more than once, you should use a class instead of an ID.

For the trafficzap thing, you just need to encode the ampersand in the url. SO instead of &, put &. (that's actually in Busy's post at the very top of this page!!)

Fix those things and it should validate

Rob - I don't know about CF. It's not a standard so the validator wouldn't understand it. It does handle PHP pages fine. You'd have to try it and see what happens.

robbluther — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 16:36:27 +0000

How do you get ColdFusion Code to validate?