BigDave - 5:08 pm on Feb 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

There is a difference between writing broken code, which doesn't validate, and working code that doesn't validate. I think that we can all agree that the first is bad. You should always close your quotes and your elements.

There is a difference between an error that causes parsing problems, and one that simply violates some spec, but doesn't cause any problems. Quoting attributes is one of these issues. Forgetting to quote "rowspan=2" is not going to cause any decent rendering engine or spider any real or imagined problems. Forgetting to quote a "style=" which is full of punctuation and spaces might be parseable, with a ridiculous amount of work, but that is likely to introduce other errors.

I've seen broken code get fixed and had it lead to improved ranking. I have also seen things "cleaned up" so they improve in ranking. I have not seen working-but-doesn't-validate code get "fixed to validate" and improve in ranking.

I also hope those of you discussing going with CSS, aren't discussing external style sheets reducing bytes. You have to remember the bytes for the additional file request, not t mention the latency and the server processing time and the additional server load for just a few bytes of gain.