Slashdot’s Validity
With the Redesign Watch back up and running, the most recent entry is Slashdot, the venerable geek portal so infamous for its ability to kill web servers with a single link that the site’s name is a verb meaning “to bring a server grinding to a halt”.
I was asked in a comment:
What’s your feeling on slashdot being HTML 4.01 (and slightly failing validation) VS XHTML 1.0?
My feeling is good. Why? Let’s take the second part first.
When it comes to HTML versus XHTML, I just do not care. Sure, sure, people will tell you that XHTML is XML so it’s more transformable or something. That’s a very good argument when the XHTML is well-formed and valid. It’s also a very good argument for using HTML when it’s well-formed and valid. Conversely, neither HTML nor XHTML is easily transformed when ill-formed and invalid. This is an experiential point of view, too: I’ve written XSLT (which is itself so tortuous and ugly that it almost by definition cannot be called well-formed) to transform both HTML and XHTML, and the effort is pretty much the same each way—assuming well-formed, valid markup.
So as far as I’m concerned, there’s really no major practical difference between HTML and XHTML. There are plenty of minor practical differences, like having to throw trailing slashes on all your empty elements in XHTML and needing some namespace information. Some people will tell you the whole MIME-type thing is a major practical concern, but I’m just not that much of a purist. Take that for whatever it’s worth.
I mean, imagine a world where Slashdot had used XHTML instead of HTML, and was failing validation. How would that be any better or worse than things are now?
Okay, so that’s the second part. The first part, the failure to validate, is not something I can get too terribly upset about. Slashdot, as a site that accepts ads, is going to get horrible markup shoved into its pages. That’s just the way it is. If you want major sites to be perfectly valid, then in all honesty advertisers are the place to start. So they’re already operating with a major handicap there.
Even if we were to ride our high horses along a very hard line and say that ads are just no excuse, I’d be hard-pressed to fault the job they’ve done. For example, I ran a check on the Slashdot home page. Out of 1,262 lines of code, there were exactly four validation errors, and that’s using HTML 4.01 Strict—you’ll note they bypassed Transitional, which only increases my respect. Three of the errors revolved around an image in a noscript element, and the last was due to the presence of a language attribute on a script element—something they can fix in fifteen seconds, once it gets to the top of the to-do list.
You know what? I’d be ecstatic to have that low a failure rate when launching the markover of an incredibly complex site like Slashdot. Think about all the content they have to manage, stitch together, and offer up. Four errors out of all that dynamically assembled markup? I say somebody should organize them a parade for doing such a good job, and showing that any site can make use of and benefit from standards.
I’m also really looking forward to the restyling of Slashdot through user-created style sheets, and the Greasemonkey enhancements built on top of this new structure. If there’s a site whose readers are inherently primed to script the holy bejeezus out of it, that would be the one.
Would I be happier if they’d managed to achieve total validation? Of course. In the meantime, though, I’m going to be very nearly as happy for what they’ve accomplished, and also for the simple fact of it being another major site that’s taken a big step forward. Progress is always a cause for celebration in my world.
