I’m fairly lazy when it comes to validating my own site. I mean, who can be arsed making edits and then validating them all every time 😉
I know there are plenty of people who do it but I am not one of them. I normally check to make sure that it looks OK and thats about it. I am not even that concerned about displaying in Internet Explorer ( I have minimal real visitors a month and the rest is blog spam touting Viagra ). This is because I use Debian almost exclusively at work and at home and it is a major pain in the ass to check the windows side of things.
What I have tried to do is be quite strict with myself when I am making edits to my website. What this has resulted in is:
I checked 18 pages of my website and found 5 errors (all silly) all of which were on one page and caused by character references.
For those that have used the W3C validator this is not bad going at all. I know the purists will still think this is crap and that all HTML/XHTML should validate all the time. I believe this would be great too but unfortunately some of us have a life to lead outside the webosphere.
For those that always mean to get around to validating their websites but never do then my final word on HTML Validation is this:
“If you can’t validate religiously, at least edit diligently”
How can I say this. Well it takes more skill to get it right first time than to correct it after you have been shown your mistakes!!!