This site doesn't validate - Does it matter?

the colours are a bit vile on that site

a lot of sites don't validate .. a lot of the biggys

I don't see the big deal on validation (although mine has got validation). It's good to catch a few errors like a tag not closed and the browser still renders it. Also helps on the cross-browser situation.
 
Noxis said:
validation is for big fat bummers :p

(ok I have never got a site I made to validate)
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Hehe FOR SHAME! And you throwing your hat in for the new OC site!

If you look at the problems it's just a load of silly little things they've missed out that could have easily been sorted in 5 minutes or so for peace of mind. I personally validate last and fix anything I've missed, some people seem to design purely so they can stick a validated gif on their site which in fairness, half the people who view it won't understand what it means anyway...

I don't think it's the biggest problem, the margin and border validation failures indicate they don't seem to have a good grasp of css and a styled <ul> would have made for a much better left hand menu.

</bitch></dig>
 
paulsheff said:
Hehe FOR SHAME! And you throwing your hat in for the new OC site!

If you look at the problems it's just a load of silly little things they've missed out that could have easily been sorted in 5 minutes or so for peace of mind. I personally validate last and fix anything I've missed, some people seem to design purely so they can stick a validated gif on their site which in fairness, half the people who view it won't understand what it means anyway...

I don't think it's the biggest problem, the margin and border validation failures indicate they don't seem to have a good grasp of css and a styled <ul> would have made for a much better left hand menu.

</bitch></dig>
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If I was making site aimed at the public as a whole where people with disablities (or people stuck in the 1990's using lynx :p) will be using the site then of course validation is a must - but as long as the code is tidy and the validation is only moaning over silly little things its pretty much a waste of time (IMO).
 
I would say that the semantic quality of the markup matters lots more than whether or not it validates. You can write a horrible table-based layout in perfect, valid XHTML if you like, or you can write a structurally sound, semantic design that might not validate for a relatively superficial reason (not encoding an &, missing a closing slash on an <img /> tag etc).

Take the site you linked to, for example, and view the source. A horrible mess of nested tables with inline styling and font tags scattered about it. You could fix the markup errors so that it validated, but it would still be a badly made site.
 
Markup is the very foundation of a site, it's what everything stands upon when the page is presented to the user, and I believe it's really quite important to take care and attention writing it. Indeed, as rob says, quality of the markup should take priority over quality of the syntax, but it's not exactly difficult to create valid code, is it?

That said, many rendering errors and display issues can be nailed down first to a typo or mislaid tag in your code. If you write valid code, you remove a huge amount of debugging work that needs to be done. If you know your code is correct then you only need to look to the browser/user-agent manufacturer for the blame. That alone seems to be enough of a benefit for ensuring validation.

However, there is one area where validation is fundamentally important, and that's in authoring XHTML. XML parsers aren't meant to have any of the loose rules and acres of error correction that the SGML parsers for HTML have in today's browsers. If you're authoring XHTML, you should be ensuring your code is all present and correct in order that it can be used as intended.

Oh, and search engines prefer valid code - they've got to process your documents just as a browser does. Error-checking, and stripping of redundant data to extract the good content. The more invalid your code is, the more likely they could ignore some juicy bit of content that would have got you right on page 1 of Google.
 
JonRohan said:
i'd recommend www.trailblasters.co.uk if you want to look at a nice mountain biking website.
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Personally i don't find changing the colour of the navigation/some title headers any use at all.

I think it's pretty pointless.

I think the title needs work on also, its barley readable, less dirt distortion on the font would improve the readability.

also the photo-page needs some work, the visuals don't carry on on that page, not sure why.

Apart from that and (i find personally, the page too thin) it is not a bad example.
 
that trailblasters site inspires me a lot.

I like most of the stuff that guy does (can't remember his name on here) and he seems very professional with his attitude. an inspiration for all really.
 
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I was using trailblasters merely as an example of an informative website for mountain biking enthusiasts not for people to pick the design to bits.
 
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