Sniptools

Mike Davidson from ESPN recently interviewed with Eric Meyer from Netscape. A pragmatic yet interesting attitude for a business website developer.

Eric Meyer interviewed Mike Davidson from ESPN on the Netscape DevEdge website.

Mike has this to say about valid code: “Then there’s validation. Telling me my site needs to validate in order to be standards-compliant is like telling me I need a flag in my lawn to call myself an American. For a simple, small, text-heavy site like a blog, validation may come relatively easily, but when you have a site like ours which dynamically writes out a lot of content, uses
third-party statistical tracking, makes liberal use of Flash, and offers
complex and flexible advertising modules, validation is simply a pie in
the sky.”

He goes on to explain the major categories that cause the validation errors, among them being that the validator doesn’t understand javascript, so complains when they close a tag that has been opened via a script. There are others: he lists a total of 5 sources: javascript coding, ad server requirements, statistical tracking software, alt values — he doesn’t believe blank alt values are worth the trouble — and their flash delivery methods.

His basic point is that validation was the ideal to be striving for, but
that it can’t always be achieved. The most impressive point in favor of
his approach is that he appears (I say “appears” because I haven’t
pursued this with him personally) to have run the site through the
validator and has checked out all the errors it found and has a sound
business case for each exception, except for the blank alt values. I’m
not sure I agree with his attitude on them, though.

The Big Thing about the ESPN story, though, is the fact that here’s a
large, presentation-heavy website that says there is a sound business
case for moving towards standards. At ESPN it seems the attitude changed
from “build it any old way” to “only deviate from standards when there’s
a solid case to do so.”

Bottom line: That’s the best attitude we can expect to see from a
business site. And there are many sites that wouldn’t hit those
exceptions and so would be compliant.

I really appreciate attitudes like Davidson’s, especially as cases abound of “web designers” who find nothing wrong with the pages their websites will sport, studded with a bevy of <font>’s and <center>’s and all the
other garbage because the pages display fine on IE/Win 5.0 (their browser) and they resent the suggestion of going beyond their GoLive.

This post is tagged Musings