I can hardly tell you how frustrated I get trying to make webpages W3C compliant. It is as if the people who make up the standards purposely make the standards impossible. A perfect example of this is the fact that a lot of Amazon code and YouTube do not validate. So if you want to put a YouTube video on your site with anything like a reasonable cut and paste, you are out of luck. The fact is that YouTube uses the <embed> tag, and W3C says this is a no-no. You have to go through all kinds of gyrations to get the thing to work. Why something so common can’t validate with a simple cut and paste is beyond me.
Okay I am ranting. It is just that I have had to make so many compromises to get my code to validate. Now that I have decided to integrate video into my websites, I am confronted with yet another obstacle to validation. I created a video showing a butterfly coming forth from its cocoon. I got so frustrated trying to make the thing validate on the webpage, that I typed beneath the validation logo, “Validates except the YouTube video.”
This whole validation thing has me bugged. I wonder how many sites actually do validate. With all the video out there, it can’t be too many. I can see a reason for standards, but it seems like the people who are making the standards have no concept of what web site builders need.
When creating a template for my websites, I ran into interminable problems just trying to come up with a way to have three columns on a page and end up with a footer. I worked for several days, just to do get validated what used to be a few lines of code and a table or two. I am still not happy with the hack that I had to do to make it work. Now why couldn’t the CSS people and the W3C people have tried actually building a few sites and iron out these kind of problems, rather than let developers agonize over problems that really have no meaning? The number of man hours thrown away addressing these problems must be astronomical.
“Why bother?” you may well ask. Two reasons really. The first is, by validating every page, my code gets checked for accuracy. The second is my sneaking suspicion that Google checks it and it may influence how the algorithm sees my web page.
