I agree having a valid site is great, but once you start passing it off to the client and they start adding their own stuff - there is only so much you can do to ensure the pages remain valid - word text clean up scripts, combined with a decent WYSIWG editor/decent php clean-up script

Oh I think I just had a brainwave for an idea

Just discovered this forum by accident and thought I'd throw in my 2c worth...

I agree with Louie on this one. I usually try to get all my pages to validate, but the client invariably screws it up by throwing in the odd ampersand or whatever.

Case in point - this page has 1 error according to W3C and 6 warnings [e.g. Line 300 column 86: character "&" is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data. I rest my case m'lud] and 113 warnings according to Firefox HTML Validator.

Which brings me to the next point........
What do designers use to validate their pages? validator.w3c.org is presumably the de facto standard, but where does HTML Validator fit in. The latter seems to have a much tighter set of rules.

For example, HTML Validator insists on a table having a 'summary' attribute, but W3C doesn't seem to care.

Opinions?

Strange that, I just checked with the Firefox Validator (Web dev toolbar plugin, that validates the page on w3c)

http://validator.w3.org/check?verbos...alidation.html

And it says the page is valid and only 5 warnings are apparant

Could it be that there are required elements to meet w3c standards, whilst "summary" tags, etc are optional - since they are used primarily by screen readers, etc

Woohoo! Vbulletin rocks

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If your site isn't valid you aren't going to pass any accessibility tests. At the moment many designers dont see this as an issue, but with coming EU legislation it will become one for medium/large business (laws like these tend to only effect companies with X employees/turnover, i think). I'd strongly recommend that all your pages at least pass validation, in fairness its not that hard (I use the FireFox Web Developer plugin to check).

Of course if your client edits your code you have no control. You may be able to limit the damage by marking off, with comments, clear places in the html where they should edit (a news section for example) and by using CSS cleverly so they dont have to type many tags to enter a new item. So to add a new news item they should only have to add maybe a h2 tag and a 'p' tag and the text, defenatly no divs etc...

Option number two is to only allow them update through a CMS system, prob overkill for many sites but the only way to ensure the site stays valid. However a CMS system doesn't guarantee an Accessible site and it'll take a good bit of work to get it there. (or you could hire me )

good luck
des

After more then 8 hours of work I managed to get my home page to validate. Man some work has to be put into this kind of service.

Imagine doing that for a customer.

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Surely if a client was *paying* for it you would do it?

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I would but it won't come cheap let me tell you.
to get from 200> errors to none that is some work.

well most clients still are not aware about validation and accessibility - however that said, some coders will endevour to give their clients a valid site - until they balls it up with a CMS or their own idea of code

as a matter of interest - what site was it that you got valid? (ah never mind, tis your besecure2000 shop that is)

Yes that's it.