The eclectic musings of a bitter software engineer.

I couldn't resist; validmyass.org is now a reality

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 04:26 PM (PDT)

In my previous post I complained about how much I hate websites that claim to be valid XHTML or CSS when they really aren’t. I half-heartedly mentioned I’d like to put together a database of offending websites.

Well, I was bored, so I went and did it.

Comments

Take 'em down, Wonko. Take the bastards down.

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 04:57 PM (PDT) Posted by bedrick

http://matt.wordpress.com/ actually passes the online CSS validation.

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 04:59 PM (PDT) Posted by GreyStork

Looks like someone fixed it after it was listed. Result!

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 05:04 PM (PDT) Posted by Ryan Grove

Hmm. I wonder if it would be possible to write a script that googled for the phrase "Valid XHTML 1.0," automatically validated the resulting pages and added the flunkees to your database? Of course, that wouldn't be as "fun" as doing it manually...

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 05:34 PM (PDT) Posted by GreyStork

And it'd be prone to false positives. A search on that phrase would return plenty of pages (including validmyass.org) that use the phrase but don't claim to be valid themselves.

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 05:41 PM (PDT) Posted by Ryan Grove

Well, if this hypothetical bot searched the pages for the tell-tale link to W3's validator, those could probably be avoided.

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 06:14 PM (PDT) Posted by GreyStork

That's true, but the whole point of this thing is to give people (namely me) an outlet for venting their frustrations at stupid webmasters by submitting their sites to the database. If we automate it, there's no satisfaction!

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 06:23 PM (PDT) Posted by Ryan Grove

There is that.

Monday September 19, 2005 @ 07:48 PM (PDT) Posted by GreyStork

We no longer claim to be valid (that just was included in the theme we used)!

Wednesday September 21, 2005 @ 11:17 AM (PDT) Posted by dh
Done.

I should point out that I don't really care whether it's just included in the theme or not; if that bugs you, complain to the author of the theme.
Wednesday September 21, 2005 @ 11:45 AM (PDT) Posted by Ryan Grove

That's kind of sad. Isn't the w3c an organization largely devoted to web standards?

Wednesday September 21, 2005 @ 01:41 PM (PDT) Posted by Eilonwy
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