swa66 - 6:32 am on Jan 20, 2009 (gmt 0)

Validation is your only weapon in a fight to get your site to render properly on all browsers out there. Nope. Your only weapon is called testing. I've had pages that validate render differently on different browsers. Running a validation program is only one sanity check. If something doesn't validate, I check it out, but I don't fix it if it ain't really broke. It's like getting warnings back from a compiler, it is simply telling you that something might be wrong.

So that means you feel you can test in all browsers ?
E.g. you have all models of all phones in active use around the world operating ?
I'm sure you can also test future browsers ;-)

I'm not just talking about the handful of browsers on computers (including the poor excuse for a browser called MSIE), *all* of them is a _lot_ harder.
E.g. if you're in the US or Europe or most of the rest of the world, try testing your site on a Japanese iMode phone... you don't get to buy them, and don't have a network to test them on.

So why can big names like Google do this differently ? Well first they have a global presence, far larger budgets and most importantly browser makers will test their contraptions against sites like Google's (not against our stuff)

Really testing is useful, but it's a small part if you want it to work always, validating code is also not going to become less important (xhtml content e.g. should not be rendered at all if not valid)