Sharpe's Opinion

Dizzy makes a good point about whether the Number 10 site should use Wordpress, but I think it’s a little rich for him to include a screenshot of the site failing the W3C standards validation test when his own site contains more than 9 times as many markup errors.

His argument that it doesn’t matter because his site is a personal blog just doesn’t hold water – standards are there to make life easier for web designers, because if all browsers comply to standards then you can get away from using tricksy hacks to get your site displaying and working correctly in all browsers. If designers don’t write sites to comply with standards, why should browsers display them in a way which complies with standards?

For the purpose of comparison only, not to blow my own trumpet or anything, doing the test for this site gives the following result:

Devils Kitchen is bang on the money, though – Dizzy’s inclusion of the Number 10 site’s failed validation report has almost nothing to do with the issue he’s accusing them of – standards compliance is not the same as accessibility. Accessibility concerns are met with things like allowing the layout to scale up gracefully when a user wants a larger font size (something I’ve wrestled with on this site), ensuring the site is still readable when you remove the style sheets (for those you use text-to-speech software, text-only browsers, or other non-mainstream systems), and many other considerations which DK explains better (and with more authority) than I do.

The last word, therefore, goes to Devil’s Kitchen:

So, stuff IE and stuff W3C and stuff their f******g validators. Whilst they are a good place to start, be wary of putting your faith in them; you should certainly not rely on them to tell you whether your site conforms to Web Accessiblity rules, because they cannot do so.