OpenWack Community Software Blog

Just a quick note to let you know we are flying fast towards the Pantheon of Eternal Open Source Harmony and Prosperity. Meaning we are writing more code and fixing bugs.

Since all the fun can now be tracked at WackWall you might find it interesting how we approach bug fixing at the moment.

Everyone of you saw those fancy labels on sites and software products indicating that the page markup passed W3C validation.

Hereby I claim that W3C validation will not be the priority of OpenWack pages markup nor will it ever be a requirement for OpenWack themes and plugins.

W3C standards were introduced with a good idea of validating HTML and CSS to be supported by all generally available browsers. But the reality is that they bring unnecessary restrictions and do not guarantee anything.

For example, putting block elements in <a> will not validate. Tag <object> (for a flash video player e.g.) will not validate. Although both those examples are handled fine by all relevant web-browsers of today. Why restrict then? These are examples of XHTML Transitional, I’m not even speaking of XHTML Strict.

On the other hand you can write W3C compliant code but there’s no guarantee that it will work in IE7 or (oh god) in IE6. It’s absolutely necessary to test your code in these browsers and even write some CSS hacks to handle their misbehavior. Microsoft did a great job of creating this mess.

I understand why software like Adobe Dreamweaver will generate W3C-compliant markup at all costs. This is marketing and is aimed at people who know what W3C validation is but are not aware of its failure. So realistically for now these are just labels. And they significantly contributed to the wide adoption of the standards that fail to bring the order.

We will try to maintain those standards wherever reasonable but not for the sole purpose of staying compliant with them. Given the mentioned shortcomings we do not see big reasons to comply.

There’s a much more effective practice of just testing all your markup in all major browsers people use. That’s the only relevant validation you can get to write software aimed at providing adequate user experience.

Nice to see you here, on the blog about OpenWack software product… even while there’s no product yet. Until that point we are going to share some thoughts and decisions we make during the development period. What better time to express your opinion before it’s too late ;)

So if for some reason you are not one of the 5 people who care about this project at this moment – feel free to say hi and to participate. We hope to build good software for you.

Thanks.