[theme-reviewers] w3c validation and html5 in core

[Mike Little]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 15:54, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Edward Caissie <edward.caissie at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Although validation is important it is not, and others may disagree, an
> > absolute point to resolve a Theme to "not-approved".
>
> I agree. Since the web started moving away from XHTML and back towards
> the HTML side of things, validation has become less important overall.
>
> Validation made sense for XHTML, since XHTML is required to be a valid
> XML document. HTML, on the other hand, is more freeform, and doesn't
> require exact adherence to the standard. HTML parsers ignore things
> they don't understand, so it's perfectly valid HTML for me to write
> <input foo=bar> even if foo isn't a valid attribute. The validator
> systems will complain about this, because they don't know what foo is,
> but different browsers will interpret foo according to their own
> schemes.
>
>
Actually that's not by definition valid HTML but moving on...

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.

Please don't think it is only about visual appearance.

Another issue is that JavaScript is much more likely to fail with an invalid
DOM.

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.

Mike
-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/
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