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.

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

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

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...

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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