Jumping The Validation Hoop
Tagged with: creativity, semantic, validation
A while ago, it appeared to be a measure of design quality to have that validation button at the bottom of our designs, proving to viewers we had taken the time to ensure our code was valid. The thing is, how important is this and why have a lot of people started to leave them out of websites? I don’t know about everyone else but I have my own reasons.
The Creative Process
It would be great if we could jump right into Photoshop and design away until we had a pixel-perfect piece of art and not have to worry about how the finished site would actually work. Sadly, this isn’t quite the case. On one hand, our creativity shouldn’t be limited to a set of guidelines set out by our coding standards and on the other hand, our designs need to ‘work’ when complete. Whilst it’s important to keep standards at the top of our priorities when coding, I don’t think it’s so important to keep hitting that validation link and looking for the green bar of approval.
Obviously, validation has a place within the workflow and is a quick guideline for debugging our code and picking out simple errors easily but it’s not the end of the world if something isn’t valid and doesn’t always mean our designs won’t work as we intended them to. If somebody comes across your site and has the experience you expected them to, is that not enough? If the site works as intended across multiple browsers and platforms; the way the intended it, who cares about that validation button?
Semantic Snobbery
There will always be certain people who measure the completion of their projects with a successful validation and they’re not likely to change their process any time soon. Semantic markup is important and I’m not suggesting otherwise but it can be taken too far. My idea of semantic is using meaningful labels and names for elements and using the correct element for the desired effect but is having ‘misplaced’ div or two to create that perfect design really such as faux pas?
Some would say yes and there are some times I would agree with those people. If the desired effect can be achieved without resorting to using the extra element then it should definitely be done that way. This isn’t always the case though and rather than changing our ideas to suit the best practice for coding, we should keep the initial design in minds and remember what we set out to achieve. If that takes an element that isn’t “allowed” to be there, then so be it.
This may sound like I’m brushing standards aside but I’m definitely not. I would take any measures to ensure the design can be realised using semantic markup before even thinking about that extra div and would only consider using it if it’s completely necessary and that’s not even too often.
Design First, Validation Second
Basically, I think too many people place too much focus on the validation of their projects and actually let it inhibit the creativity they initially set out with. If we stick to a strict set of boundaries, we end up never pushing the boundaries of what we can do and our designs get stale and ‘used’.
I would most definitely recommend using semantic markup and checking for errors with the validation tool, just don’t let it dictate your designs to you. It should be there as a final checkpoint and the icing on the cake, not our inspiration and design guideline.
In my most recent designs, which hasn’t been too lately as I segued to photography as my primo, I always provide validation links — HTML, CSS, and WAI (through Cynthia) — but I do so in such a way that only the admin, editors, and article author(s) can access them. They’re meaningless and can be misleading to the general public. And certainly just because a site is valid does not mean it’s accessible or of high quality. So posting them for all is sort of silly. Yet, doing it a la the method I described, my web clients can still have access to “tools” which can be helpful to them in the day-to-day management of their sites/blogs (if trained accordingly). I do this with WordPress, but it’s pretty easy to do via other methods as well.
Nice article, Dave. From what I’ve seen here you write well and offer some interesting topics. Kudos to you.
Thanks for stopping by Mike.
It’s certainly an interesting way of doing things. I always feel like those posting the links are doing so just to prove they can code to standards. The sites should be built well regardless of the validation and we shouldn’t feel the need to display public links to them, visitors have nothing to gain from clicking it.
Thanks for the comments too, things are a bit messy here at the moment, I’ve not updated often enough but I’m in the process of a new design and I’m fixing the whole structure of the site to accommodate future designs.