Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

I started the Mac Tips site about 11 months ago, by hand. By that I mean I entered everything in TextEdit and tabbed over to Safari to see how it looked. Over the months it would get fancier and fancier, and then I’d edit the look and refine it again.

This wasn’t too hard to do because most of the style elements are called out to a single CSS file. Usually I could change quite a lot just by modifying the CSS file, or changing a few common images, or at worst—using MassReplaceIt to do a blanket tweak to every published page.

Anyways.

All this tweaking had left the code a little messy looking. I really wanted to compact it and cut out a lot of the repetition, especially in the style classes. So today I copied out some sample files and hacked away—removing unused styles, combining others, and generally tidying things up. I uplinked the files and ran a validator.

Imagine my horror to find that there were dozens of errors! I was really pissed. I double checked to see how the pages looked in all the browsers (perfect in every case).

Every time I fixed a so-called error the validator would find two more! In the end I thought I’d try a little experiment—I tried the validator on several other sites that I like. Same result—dozens of errors. This thing is just too pedantic to be true.

Does anyone pass with anything more than “Hello world.” Next time I’m doing things by the book, but for now—I’m easy.