i·me·michael

In a recent article at Web Techniques called Raise Your Standards, Molly E. Holzschlag discusses web standards and why you should know, understand, and implement them where appropriate. She even mentions learning to read the DTDs to increase your understanding of the markup you are using.

It’s a good article. It makes a good case. Molly is an honored and influential member of the web community. What’s ironic, is that in light of her article, I checked Molly’s site in the W3C validator and found that as of this writing, it doesn’t validate. Isn’t it ironic … don’t ya’ think? [via zeldman]

In fact I find it more and more. I visit site after site, that claims validation of one sort or another and find that they don’t validate. They mean well. Sometimes it’s just a simple error and sometimes it’s laziness. More often it seems that it’s a lack of really knowing or understanding the specification. And while it’s good to see more sites validating, and personal sites leading the way, I’d hate to see people jumping on the bandwagon without really understanding what they’re getting themselves into. I certainly don’t mean to say that any of the sites mentioned here do that. Just that if people want to start using standards, they need to understand them before they start claiming they use them.

Molly’s article is laudable in this regard, but the work doesn’t stop once we’ve made our sites standards compliant. We need to keep after it.