ProvidentHost Blog

ProvidentHost.com is proud to announce that recently all main web pages were tested against W3C XHTML and CSS validator and are proven to be XHTML and CSS valid. XHTML and CSS validity icons from W3C are put at the bottom of those tested pages, at the left and right of the copyright notice, to prove the validation.

One problem is found when trying to validate the CSS of foreign-languages.php, a page that is designed with UTF-8 encoding to ensure the display of non English characters such as those in Japanese, Korean, or Russian language. The page passed the XHTML validator. However, when trying to validate the CSS of the page, W3C CSS validator gave an error message. Apparently, there is a bug in W3C CSS validator when trying to validate a web page with UTF-8 encoding as stated by W3C at W3C Bug List with the bug number 1762.

Generally, some people will not understand why these validations are necessary. In the FAQ page, W3C stated that:

One of the important maxims of computer programming is: Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept. Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if they’re not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

That means pages that are not valid may be incorrectly displayed or even non-displayable at some browsers. For example, a page that is perfectly displayed using Windows based Internet Explorer may be incorrectly displayed using MAC based Internet Explorer. This condition is of course unpleasant especially when considering that disabled people are using a more specialized browser.

Thus, by creating valid web pages and prove the validity, ProvidentHost.com shows that ProvidentHost.com has taken a great care to create interoperable web pages for all visitors.

Technorati Tags: XHTML and CSS valid, validity icons, XHTML validator, W3C, CSS validator