What is the only thing you can do with a computer that is more painful and less rewarding than a trip to the dentist – I suggest that its making your web pages pass CSS2/XHTML validation. Or to requote the old stand by:
“Making my CSS/HTML pass W3 validation is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling, but nobody notices”
Yes, my personal homepage and a few other selected pages on my website now pass validation. It all started with www.herod.net/steven/ but in a fit of drunken madness I decided on Sunday to revise the herod.net home page and a few other ‘selected’ pages.
And what have I learned? Well, I’ve learned is this:
- The CSS2 spec is not written for quick reference.
- That IE/Firefox have many of the quirks I used to enjoy in the good old days when I last believed in web standards (1999 – IE 4 vs NS 4), the difference is these days you will be able to find a workable middle ground.
- That you can live without tables… my god, I never thought I’d say that.
- That Style Master 4.0 is….. incomprehensible (Sorry John)
- That you can lower your pages sizes… and occasionally increase them.
- That at the end of the day, you can’t tell the difference in what it looks like.
- I miss vertical centering
- Expect to be frustrated and curse the gods.
- It’s a way of thinking, and getting in that way of thinking is the key.
So, now I know what I should do, and I’m familiar with how to replicate in CSS what I used to do with good old fashioned html tags.
An now, at the end of it, I can put some icons on my site and walk around with a feeling self satisfaction – (but I’ll never get those 6 hours of my life back).