

[Invalid] Markup Validation of Apple.com - Archit
http://blog.archit.in/2011/03/invalid-markup-validation-of-apple-com/

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bcrescimanno
A whole lot of FUD here.

1\. Check out the CSS validation link; mostly there are rules included for
CSS3 properties that are not yet standardized and Apple has provided vendor
specific rules for many browsers that don't validate. So you're really nailing
them here for adding cross-platform compatibility to their home page? Kinda
weak "evidence."

2\. One of the HTML5 validation errors is adding the X-UA-Compatible flag for
IE. Again, Apple goes outside the spec (as TONS of sites do) to be cross
platform.

3\. You end your article by stating that, "For Apple, the showcase isn’t
really about web standards; It’s about their own version of web standards." At
the same time, the Apple website works diligently through the CSS3 and HTML5
markup to bring the best possible experience to a very wide range of browsers.
Moreover, you state that the demos work in Chrome if you spoof the user agent.
If that's the case, isn't that showing that Apple's using _real_ web standards
and not "their own version?"

4\. You claim that, "Not only is user-agent detection the wrong way to
determine the HTML5 capabilities of the current browser, one could easily
spoof the browser’s user-agent to fool the websites." There is no defined
specification for how a website should determine what browser a visitor is
using EXCEPT to use the User Agent String. There are many who advocate using
feature detection (and this is, in many cases, a better approach)--but your
statement that using the user agent is "wrong" is categorically incorrect.

5\. Those demos are being used as a marketing tool by Apple for the Safari
browser--I'm not going to fault a company for building a marketing tool and
then leveraging that tool.

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised I found the motivation to write this much about
your poorly crafted article. You're basically taking a shot at Apple who's
doing what basically everyone else is doing on their main site to ensure
cross-platform compatibility (in fact, by the looks of that CSS validator
output--they're doing MORE than most). Then you bash them for restricting
their demos to their own browser which, while maybe not the most "open" thing
in the world, certainly doesn't imply that they've somehow created their own
"subset" of the standards.

~~~
Dachande663
Agree with everything here except point 4. Think what he was saying is sites
should use feature detection and not browser sniffing to determine whether to
serve content. Apart from that though, spot on. Apple have done just as much
as Google, if not more, to push newer web standards onwards.

~~~
bcrescimanno
The problem is that he said using UA sniffing is wrong. Not only is it not
"wrong"--it's damn useful in certain cases and can be a valuable part of a
feature detection solution.

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Zev
A paragraph and a half in, this rant turns away from "This page doesn't
validate" to "Apple is doing it wrong." It sounds a bit like you're being
anti-Apple for the sake of having something to rant about.

Pretty much every one of the errors is either "This doesn't always exist in
some browser" or parse errors. Aren't these properties either A. ignored or B.
actually parsed correctly by the browser they're intended for?

And so what? Google.com doesn't validate, nor does Microsoft.com.

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DjDarkman
The W3C validator is not up to date and does not understand vendor prefixes.
Until they make the validator consider real-world web apps, and not just
academic markup, I won't take them seriously.

