

Y Combinator site has 66 Errors - cognitvesystem
https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=news.ycombinator.com

======
bfioca
Thinking as a founder/hacker - it's totally fine. Fixing those errors would
have no effect on the user experience. There are no viewers that aren't using
the site because of those errors. Fixing them would take time that can be more
valuably spent elsewhere.

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ColinWright
Be generous in what you accept, strict in what you provide.

Without that general principle the internet would _never_ have got working.
Even now, "standards" shift, and it's important that older sites don't simply
stop working because of things that were once perfectly valid becoming
slightly out-of-fashion.

Complexity is like a dead cat under the carpet. You can push it around all you
like, but it will still be there, and someone still needs to deal with it.

It's just a shame that after a while it starts to smell, and the smell is hard
to get rid of.

~~~
edge17
So true. Imagine the dead cats under the rugs that we entrust our lives to
every day... traffic lights, onboard computers, flight navigation software.
Anyone seasoned in software knows that the point is not to write bugfree
software but to understand what your code is doing and how it's impacting
things across the whole system. Code is very very complex and bugs can be
introduced from compilers, third part libraries, yourself, system upgrades,
hardware issues, etc.

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k__
If browsers didn't have to accept faulty pages, they would probably much much
smaller, less complex and more efficient.

But we moved all this complexity into browsers. So only the few browser
manufacturers are in need of highly skilled devs and the rest of the world can
stick with "us" ;)

------
readme
Many of the pages on w3c.org's own site do not validate completely. The front
page validates as XHTML strict, but the other pages linked to from it have
errors and are supposed to be HTML5 according to the doctype.

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davelnewton
Some of the "errors" you point out are only barely even errors, like missing
`alt` attributes (nice for accessibility, not so helpful when the image isn't
actually content).

Others like using empty trs for spacing is just old-school HTML wrangling.
Could it be improved? Sure. Does it actually _matter_? Only barely.

Many of the errors are dupes; if you roll them up there are significantly
fewer "errors". Which makes sense, because the HTML on HN is trivial to begin
with, by design.

What was the point, even?

------
readme
YC doesn't even have a <!doctype> declaration. It's obvious to me that the
authors know the browser is going to run in quirks mode and don't care.

It obviously works.

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Kenji
Making a website compliant is like manufacturing your product with twice the
precision necessary - for no reason whatsoever. But it's fun - if you're a
masochist.

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J_Darnley
Why aren't you complaining that you checked against HTML 4.01 Transitional
rather than 5, or 6, or whatever version you cutting edge people demand? You
could then jack it up to 144 errors!

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seiji
fun fact: pg hand-wrote the (original) news.yc http server (in arc) and it
wasn't standards compliant. it terminated newlines with '\n' instead of '\r\n'
causing much pain when trying to integrate any external tools. but, browsers
accepted it, so it wasn't worth fixing.

Plus, let's ignore the whole "we only learned HTML in 1995 and never looked
modern practices again" thing too because, well, it still works. Sometimes
it's worth spending 5 hours making something just work using what you know
instead of spending 500 hours making something ideologically pure.

~~~
krapp

        <meta charset="UTF-8">
    

..would not even take even 500 seconds.

~~~
seiji
Well, they are setting charset with headers instead which works fine:

    
    
      % curl -I https://news.ycombinator.com/
      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Server: cloudflare-nginx
      Date: Sat, 13 Jun 2015 20:09:47 GMT
      Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

~~~
krapp
Fair enough.. that was the closest to a valid concern I could find in that
list of errors anyway.

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cognitvesystem
I hate html why the hell browser the site still work properly even if it has
66 errors

~~~
krapp
HTML is a document markup language, not a programming language. There's no
reason the site should not work in the case of markup not meeting strict
standards, certainly not for the errors listed.

Also, it's not even really 66 errors - it's mostly the same three errors
repeated over and over (no alt tag for images, adding a div inside a center
tag and something to do with the end tag for table row.)

Although, there is also no reason for HN not to conform to standards.

