Does the W3C validation have real value?

[Gemini23]

Sorry for not fully understanding how the WC3 validation works.. I see the point in it.. in terms of wanting to check whether a website has structural issues etc... BUT when I run the validation against Google there are 62 errors with 8 warnings.. and Yahoo 34 errors and 8 warnings.. BUT MSN CLEAN! YAY!

The question then is.. is the WC3 an industry standard that only MSN uses? or am I not using it correctly? OR is it normal to expect errors?

[g1smd]

I find that some types of non-valid HTML can make the CSS fail to work properly in some browsers.

I prefer to write code that has no errors in it. There's less work to do in finding problems.

Google and Yahoo take some calculated short cuts with their code because with billions of page views per hour even shaving a few dozen characters from every page makes a big change to the bandwidth used. However, the average website has no need to make such changes.

[lavazza]

I prefer to write code that has no errors in it. There's less work to do in finding problems.

Indeed!

If... no... make that when bugs (e.g cross-browser and/or cross-platform incompatibilities) occur, I find that identifying and then fixing them is much much simpler (i.e less complex) when I have valid HTML and CSS

[tonynoriega]

i personnaly think its a crock...

i have some sites that validate fully.. got the logo and everything... then there are some that i dont even care.. it renders in FF and IE all versions, just fine, and thats all that matters...

those two browsers have maintained 98% of my visitor traffic...

so validation or not, if they render correctly, the way i want, then its just as well...

i think the whole validation and logo on the site is more of like...

well, that guy in your office who is known as the brown noser... no real benefit in it, it just looks good.

[swa66]

Since there is absolutely no way one can test all browsers unless you have the resources of e.g. Google or Microsoft (do you have access to all types of phones with a browser -worldwide-, all music players, pda, game platforms, fridges, set-top boxes, ... and whatnot that might have a browser now or int the future?), the only method of giving it even a remote chance that what you create has a chance of working properly on all those browsers you don;t have access to, is to stick rigorously to standards.

So once you accept you need validation of your code, what is there left but to seek the best one you can find, that's unrelated to the tools (if any) that you use to create html and css?

Oh and BTW: the CSS at msn (start page) has at this time 2 CSS errors. [margin:none and padding:none aren't valid CSS]
Also, msn uses conditional comments to hide stuff from standards compliant browsers and validators (but then those are just targeting one browser, or one browser family)