“Can a site claim to be web-standards-compliant if it doesn’t val­i­date” seems to be the ques­tion of the moment. I think so, if it was built in the “spirit” of web stan­dards. The real world inter­venes, third party com­po­nents and naughty CMS’s get in the way, users insist on edit­ing stuff them­selves… the whole art of web site devel­op­ment is about com­pro­mise, and hey, I’m an under­stand­ing kind of person.

How­ever, as QA Nazi, I insist that the HTML and CSS on all new com­mer­cial sites that go out of PerthWeb’s door val­i­date (exten­u­at­ing cir­cum­stances excepted). Why? It’s not because I’m a per­fec­tion­ist. It’s not because I want to make our design­ers and devel­op­ers lives mis­er­able (well, not only). It’s much sim­pler than that — it’s the boss’s fault.

It’s because in our quotes and in our mar­ket­ing mate­r­ial, we make the claim that our sites are built to W3C stan­dards. This is a mar­keted as “a good thing”. Even if most clients don’t get it or don’t care, it’s there. And unfor­tu­nately, there’s no set mea­sure of “web-standards-ness”. HTML and CSS val­i­da­tion is the only quan­ti­ta­tive eval­u­a­tion cri­te­ria we have.

So while I’m happy for sites to claim to be built with web stan­dards and not val­i­date 100%, and I’m really happy to see large com­mer­cial sites mov­ing towards web stan­dards slowly, as long as we make the claim, I want 100% val­i­da­tion. And hey, it’s not that hard.