Y Combinator site has 66 Errors

https://validator.w3.org/check?uri=news.ycombinator.com

by cognitvesystem • 11 years ago

13 17 11 years ago

validator.w3.org

cognitvesystem• 11 years ago

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

davelnewton2• 11 years ago

Try running it on real sites instead of simplistic ones like HN; you'll find much, much worse.

JadeNB• 11 years ago

Would you enjoy HN more if you couldn't browse it at all than if you browsed it with errors silently handled or ignored?

krapp3• 11 years ago

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.

ColinWright• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

seiji2• 11 years ago

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.

krapp3• 11 years ago

    <meta charset="UTF-8">

..would not even take even 500 seconds.

seiji2• 11 years ago

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

bfioca• 11 years ago

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.

Kenji• 11 years ago

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.

k__• 11 years ago

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" ;)

J_Darnley• 11 years ago

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!

davelnewton2• 11 years ago

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?

readme2• 11 years ago

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.

readme2• 11 years ago

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.

Y Combinator site has 66 Errors

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