Trace - 8:39 pm on Jan 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

I'm all for best practices and having good habits, but I gave up on the whole validation thing a long time ago.

If I'm starting off with a blank page, I can assure you that once I'm done, that this page, at that exact moment will validate with no errors, is semantically correct and accessible. That is as far as I'll go. Once the page gets put to use, in the real world, it's near impossible, and definitely not cost effective, to maintain a "valid" status.

Different CMS's that are using different WYSIWYG editors that spew out different mark up, the actual editors that are doing the data entry, content from different locations and data sources... whatever the reason, it's just not realistic to think that it will all come in the same standard format.

In a perfect world we would have one Doctype, one standard to follow. Maybe then we could set different goals, like achieving valid pages, but for now I'll be content in knowing that the pages I deliver look and behave the way they're supposed to. (I don't remember ever having this conversation about a compiled language)

Afraid of validation, hardly. I'm barely aware of it's existence.