Validating HTML as UI developer

I never been asked to validate my HTML. I never needed to produce HTML compliant code. Nobody seems to care. What people care about is if it works. I think it’s not enough. WTF?! You wouldn’t do that in other fields: yeah we built it but we don’t know how conformant or valid this is.

Why UI developers specifically?

As the web is open to everyone, it’s only natural to be tolerant of errors. This tolerance is even encouraged in software construction, in order to anticipate special cases. But professional interface developers are different from other web creators.

They’re professionals.

Building a personal website, webzine, blog or for your association is not directly linked to guarantees or quality. People do what they want and what they can. On the contrary, a certain guarantee and quality is expected (depending on the project) from professionals, and it has to be there! Looking back, I find it amazing that we can build OK sites when the user click on a thing do the action… The background is a div with an on-click event listener. Is it user-friendly? No: it lacks screen readers, keyboard and HTML semantics/UX. Is this okay? In the industry, yes. IMHO no. For the users, mostly not.

Is this fucked up? I think something is definitely wrong. I am not alone.

We need to agree on what is good, efficient and standard HTML. There’s a standard anyway! Few read it though. I didn’t and I will… We should have tools that verify our entire website. We should be able to check every page of a static site.

Usable Resources

Okay so we need to validate HTML and ensure it is correct. The first go-to validator is the W3C html validator.

A new version of the HTML validator is in preparation. The Nu HTML Checker should improve the current state of the art!

Note the Deque University also provide an online HTML validator that uses the W3C one under the hood.

There is an npm package for it, some linters. Few IDE extensions provide supports for community patterns

Is there more? I don’t know. Yes it’s not much. I feel also limited. There’s definitely something to do there. Starting by collecting all useful resources to write good html.

I’m still left wanting more with this post, feeling as though I’ve skimmed over the subject. That’s the problem, even my knowledge of the subject is limited.