Invalid Validation

AKMA points us to Dorothea who points us to the W3C HTML Validation Service, a nicely done tool. Put in an URL and it instantly comes back with the list of syntactical errors in its HTML — attributes that need to be within quotation marks, paragraph tags within block elements, ALT attributes left out of graphic links. Why, there are hundreds of mistakes in the very page you’re reading. It’s completely, totally, unredeemably INVALID! In fact, the home page for OASIS , the SGML/XML standards group, is INVALID, XML.com is INVALID, the O’Reilly home page is INVALID, Linus Torvalds‘ home page is INVALID, and the 12-line home page of Google has a bold-faced FATAL ERROR in it.

Reminds me of an old joke. A man goes to a doctor. “Doc, it hurts when I go like this,” he says, poking himself gently in the foot with his index finger. “It hurts when I go like this,” he says, poking his knee. “It hurts when I go like this,” he says as he pokes his thigh. He proceeds the same way up to the top of his head.

“Yup,” says the doctor, “You have a broken finger.”

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