your own standard

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.