<div><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 15:54, Otto <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:otto@ottodestruct.com">otto@ottodestruct.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="im">On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Edward Caissie <<a href="mailto:edward.caissie@gmail.com">edward.caissie@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> Although validation is important it is not, and others may disagree, an<br>
> absolute point to resolve a Theme to "not-approved".<br>
<br>
</div>I agree. Since the web started moving away from XHTML and back towards<br>
the HTML side of things, validation has become less important overall.<br>
<br>
Validation made sense for XHTML, since XHTML is required to be a valid<br>
XML document. HTML, on the other hand, is more freeform, and doesn't<br>
require exact adherence to the standard. HTML parsers ignore things<br>
they don't understand, so it's perfectly valid HTML for me to write<br>
<input foo=bar> even if foo isn't a valid attribute. The validator<br>
systems will complain about this, because they don't know what foo is,<br>
but different browsers will interpret foo according to their own<br>
schemes.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Actually that's not by definition valid HTML but moving on...</div><div><br></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">You should consider Accessibility, which is a legal requirement for a lot of sites in a number of countries. Alternative browsing technologies, especially screen readers, work best with valid semantic HTML, whatever flavour.<div>
<br></div><div>Please don't think it is only about visual appearance.</div><div><br></div><div>Another issue is that JavaScript is much more likely to fail with an invalid DOM.</div><div><br></div><div>So whilst strict HTML or XHTML validation is almost certainly out of scope for the theme review team.  It would be good for them to be aware that invalid markup can make a site impossible to use for  users with access difficulties. And per your example form elements are often a particular issue.</div>
<div></div></div></div><div><br></div>Mike<br>-- <br>Mike Little<div><a href="http://zed1.com/" target="_blank">http://zed1.com/</a></div><div><br></div><br>
</div>