Julian Klewes

your own standard

Tagged

Categorized
Dated
This article was posted in SeptemberNovember 16, 2006







This site does validate, but so what?! It displays fine and everyone is happy, so why spent numerous hours on fixing ‘bugs’ such as adding missing ‘backslashes’ to
items. Pointless indeed.

You may have neglected to close an element, or perhaps you meant to “self-close” an element, that is, ending it with “/>” instead of “>”.

I march my own standard; a great article posted on mikeindustries.com tells you even more about the idea of invalidity.

For all lazy clickers, here an excerpt:

[...] this site renders my entire domain XHTML 1.0 Non-Compliant. Invalid. Erroneous. Whatever you want to call it. Here are the various crimes this one line of code commits:

    * An ampersand is not properly encoded
    * An alt tag is missing
    * An attribute called ‘myfavoritetag’ is made up
    * An attribute is missing quotes
    * A script tag is missing its type and language attributes
    * A non-closing tag is missing its trailing slash
    * A tag is upper case? gasp!

By invalidating my entire site with this one line of code, I ensure that I am made aware the instant it matters. The instant this stuff starts to break anything in the real world, I will know. If I only had a few small errors on a few random pages around my site, I could easily miss the day when ?the big switchover? happens and wind up with broken pages I don’t know about. And since this code is in the form of a server-side include, I can freely remove it with a few clicks.

It’s kind of like carrying a canary down a mine shaft with you. As long as the canary is alive and chirping, you know you’re okay for air. Actually, I guess it’s not really like that.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

share me please

h4x3d.com does not host any illegal content. Links/Files referred to are for educational purposes only.

Interact - Leave a comment

Engage in the conversion and leave a comment.
I would much love to hear from you. Please note however that comments are moderated by default. Advertising and rant is welcomed, yet often discarded...
See left/right for additional information













2

January 29, 20086:42 am
January 29th, 2008 6:42 am

Stephen Jordan

Hey, just want to say i like your site. I’ve read a few posts here and there, but right now i don’t have the time :P

I was just checking the stats of vists etc to here, dam you have had alot! How much bandwidth gets eaten up every month/year? i’m just curious :P

4

January 29, 200810:51 am
January 29th, 2008 10:51 am

jez

hey stephen, thanks for stopping by: This site does currently eat some 75401757 kb = 73634.52 mb = 72 gb / month. quite a lot but still within the limits, I have some spare 2000gb per month at hand :)

6

February 8, 20084:24 pm
February 8th, 2008 4:24 pm

Dave

I think the point of serving pages as xhtml is it ensures other web services can process them without falling over or having to resort to tag soup parsers.

Why bother serving your page as XHTML if you don’t care if it can be parsed as such? Just serve it as HTML instead :)

comment? jump to the form



archives | sitemap | contact | tos

Top
advertise
advertise

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

solarVPS.com - reliale enterprise hosting
you know the game, get in touch with me
3