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We All Need Validation

The website repair job continues... mostly because CuteFTP is the only piece of software I have right now that's working reliably. It's much more fun than Diablo II anyway. Really.

Anyway, for kicks I ran my site through the W3C Validator. Ugh, how humiliating. Unknown character encoding! Unquoted attribute percentage signs! Oh, the horror...

Well, I fixed the little nitpicky things. But I'm afraid I had to settle for validating HTML 4.01 Transitional rather than HTML 4.01 Strict. I mean, to validate Strict, you have to give up all those deprecated tags, like BGCOLOR, in favor of cascading stylesheets. Ack!

Now, the W3C folks aren't so bad. It's their job to be pedantic. But if you look hard enough, you can find self-righteous articles that blather on about how all the hip people these days would never even touch the <BIG> tag, let alone the <FONT> tag. Hmmmm... if I just want to turn one thing on the page red and bold, how exactly does:

<SPAN STYLE="color: red; font-weight: bold">...</SPAN>

save you more trouble than

<B><FONT COLOR="RED">...</FONT></B> ?

Sure, stylesheets allow you to create and reuse classes. That's great... but sometimes you just want one simple in-line change. In that case, what exactly is the clunky stylesheet syntax buying you?

Oh well. Someday, everyone will use Amaya, CSS3 will spread throughout the land, and ne'er a Tripod homepage will be seen.

But until then, you can take away my BGCOLOR when you can pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

Edit, May 2003: Well, this post is embarrassingly dated. Just for the record, I still think that A) BGCOLOR has its uses and B) the "Font of Foulness" article is extremely silly.

Posted by Evan Goer on Oct. 29, 2001 at 3:19 PM