Is XHTML compliance pointless?

Question

I'm building a site right now, so far I've painfully forced everything to be compliant and it looks pretty much the same across browsers. However, I'm starting to implement some third party/free javascripts which do things like add attributes (eg. order=2). I could work around this but it's a pain, and I'm starting to lose my principals of making sure everything is valid. Really, is there any point to working around something like this? I got the HTMLValidator plugin for firefox, and looking at most major sites (including this one, google, etc.), they aren't valid XHTML or HTML.

Answer 1

The validation is useful to determine when things are failing to meet standards you presumably agree with. If you are purposefully using a tool that specifically adds something not in the validation standards, obviously that does not break your personal standards agreement.

This discussion gets much more difficult if you have a boss or a client who believes everything should return the green light, as you'll have to explain the above to them and convince them it's not simply you being lazy.

That said, be sure it's not simply be a case of you being lazy. While the validators may annoyingly constantly bring up every instance of the third party attribute, that doesn't invalidate (ha) the other validation errors they're mentioning. It's often worth scanning through as a means of double-checking your work.

Answer 2

Standards compliance is about increasing the chance that your page will work in the browsers you don't test against. This includes screen readers, and the next update of the browsers you do test against, and browsers which you do test against but which have been configured in unexpected ways by the user.

Validating doesn't guarantee you anything, since it's possible for your page to validate but still be sufficiently ambiguous that it won't behave the way you want it to on some browser some day.

However, if your page does validate, you at least have the force of the XHTML spec saying how it should behave. If it doesn't validate, all you have is a bunch of informal conventions between browser writers.

It's probably better to write valid HTML 3 than invalid XHTML, if there's something you want to do which is allowed in one but not the other.