Over at Codinghorror, Jeff Atwood ponders if making your pages W3C compliant is really worth all the effort. I’m sure just about everyone who has written more than a couple of html pages has thought about this. As a programmer, I find writing html and css to be a real chore. My productivity drops very close to zero whenever I’ve got to write html. But when you get down to do something as menial (from a lazy developer’s perspective) as writing html, how much harder is it to make it validate ?
But then, no fallacious argument is complete without a strawman or two. Start with more than a dozen sites (including two of his own) which don’t validate. Brilliant, capitalize on the bandwagon effect. Which is kinda like saying “Those big name sites made it big without having valid (x)html. Ipso facto, your site stands a better chance of making it big by not writing valid (x)html”. The second one’s a little better. With HTML 4.01 Strict, you can’t have a target attribute for an anchor tag. So, something like:
<a href="http://www.example.com/" target="_blank">foo</a>
Doesn’t validate. Now, I’m sure everybody these days uses some JS library (for those who don’t, there’s always getElementByClassName). Apparently, stackoverflow uses jQuery. So, here’s a solution. Start with
<a href="http://www.example.com/" class="external">foo</a>
Or something like it. Then do something like
$(a.external).attr("target","_blank");
Yeah, yeah, I know its a dirty hack, but heck it buys you compliance. For what price ? One extra line of Javascript. And the whole point in writing validators mostly is about making it easier to parse for all the programs and bots which crawl/fetch your pages and AFAIK, most of them, don’t grok Javascript. How hard is it to write
<td style="width:80px">
as opposed to
<td width=80>
Fortunately, you don’t have to compile html, so you don’t have a compiler which barks at you and also, the browsers are lax enough to consume almost any kludge that you throw at them.
The bottom line: hell yeah, its worth the effort, and how hard is it, really ? Just because your web site does’t validate, it doesn’t mean that you can brush it off. All I care about is that mine does and everyone’s should, atleast in theory 
PS:
1: In all honestly, my blog isn’t w3c validator compliant, thanks to the wordpress plugin that I use for syntax hilighting source code.
2: Accesibility matters as well, we web devs keep bitching about having to support IE6 (I do it as well). How many of our web 2.0 apps work with Javascript and css disabled or on lynx or links ?
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