Nonsensor.

Celly sent this lovely link out last week. It's called Top blogs fail W3C markup validation. It got 800-something Diggs. The first comment on Digg was "What's W3C markup validation?" I LOLed.

Here are my thoughts, in my all-time-favorite format, bullets.

• Browsers must fully support standards before developers should be expected to. I write for the browsers, not the validator.
  
• The W3C validator tool will report the number of errors based on a domino effect. It will take an unencoded URL (for instance), turn that into an unclosed tag, and from there on all other tags are improperly nested. I have seen this plenty of times. If that initial error is in the beginning of the site code, and isn't easily rectifiable, you could end up with hundreds of errors on a site the size of Engadget.
• We do have traffic code that is outside the closing HTML tag. Our bad, yes. Go yell at Gavin if you think it's that big of a deal (you're welcome, Gavin).
  
• Our WYSIWYG is not fully compliant. Why? Mostly because it's easier to align images using the ALIGN attribute, at least as long as browsers support it. Yes, I understand that WordPress and now Blogger use floats, and the result is pretty much the same, but upgrading a WYSIWYG on the scale of Blogsmith is a pretty big deal – and standards compliance is low on the giant list of requirements. Higher on that list are blogger acceptance and the "does it work" factor. It works. In all browsers, in fact. It's also the big reason why we don't use a strict doctype. You want to see validation errors, let me switch that out.
  
• Here's the big kicker: External factors beyond our control, usually Javascript ones. As WIN has been criticized for in the past, our pages have a shit ton of ads (this is a royal shit ton, not metric), and every last one of them throws at least one validation error.
  
• I hate to make excuses for myself or any of our other people, but the fact is if you're sitting around counting others' validation errors, you aren't spending as much time actually making high-traffic sites on a quick turnaround time as we are.

I could probably make up more, but that's five big things right there. But in the blog post itself, I think the answer rears its undeniable little head, right after the completely laughable assumption that "they have all the money and all the resources to hire someone just to take care of this matter."

I guess what matters most is that all these blogs can be accessed and viewed correctly (whatever that means) with the most popular browsers.

If that doesn't say it, I don't know what would. Our readers don't have any idea what the validator is, but they will certainly know it if the site is broken in X/Y browser. If anyone disagrees, I'd love to debate the subject so feel free to leave a comment.