Menace

Sunday, 11th May 2008, 2 Comments »

Netguide and Qantas Awards HTML validation

First up, if you were involved in any of the development, design, creation or just general success of any of the finalist sites, congratulations. Go have a look at the full Netguide results and Qantas results and come back, we gotta talk.

Back? Great! Now, I’m still very much of the opinion; just because a site’s HTML and/or CSS does/doesn’t validate this necessarily means that the site is/isn’t ‘well built’ or even successful. My aim doing the tests from the very beginning has always been my own personal interest in local ‘web standards’ adoption and sharing those results with other interested web people. I’m all to aware of the many complex issues and reasons can stop a site from validating e.g. a legacy CMS’s, Ad systems, or silly things like forgeting to encode ampersands, or the people creating the site simply don’t care.

However, after spending the last year and a half battling day in, day out with a dedicated team of people who do care about trying to keep a group of sites ‘valid’ at all times I’ve come to the conclusion we, and others like us, need a band of robotic slaves.

Automated HTML testing

I’ve found working on client sites, that they usually have some kind of ad-hoc system of testing (if any), be it a checklist (that usually never gets followed) or a set validation task every 6 weeks (which no one has the time for).

When you actually start to think about it, it’s crazy we don’t have our CMS not doing the ‘hard work’ for us, making sure pages are valid and letting us know when they’re not.

So, this awards validation test I used a ‘hack-on’ I’ve been developing for Openwolf. What I’m attempting to do is create a command line interface for Openwolf so I can pass through a url to be tested. My ultimate goal is to create a script that will take either an OPML or Sitemaps formatted file and test each url. A report is generated and emailed/displayed to the team.

Let me reiterate

I’m really not interested in these validation results being a web developer witchhunt or another example of me acting like an asshole (it comes naturally). I’m interested in attempting to benchmark the maturing development practices in the local market.

On suggestion from last years tests, I’ve emailed and asked a bunch of webmasters for comment about their approach to web standards and what the problems they face. I’ll post the responses as and when they come in.