[nakedintruder]

Can anyone tell me any? Can you put together a business case for having a site validating against XHTML strict that'll have any legs?

I've done a betting site at work which is going live on Tuesday, all my submitted designs were valid XHTML strict but from working with 3rd party developers now don't validate.

I want to correct this in a 2nd phase, but how can you get the business behind you to let you do this? What can you encourage them is in it for them? I have plans to add features which involve AJAX, but I don't think that's dependant on totally valid code, any ideas?

Thanks.

[paulanthony]

Future site compatibility...Mobile phone access to the site down the line...that sorta stuff?

[illvibe]

Improved SEO? More accessible? Easier to integrate with dynamic elements?

[nakedintruder]

Because it's pretty much valid as is, it's already got that, it's just stuff like & isn't & and things like that, but I still want to get it sorted, I want to totally seperate the JavaScript too. I just can't think of a business centred case for it.

[pgo]

http://www.adaptivepath.com/publicat...ves/000266.php

[nakedintruder]

Cheers, that's more about what's been done already too, I'm at a kind of stage where it's pretty much there, but I need to get really small things chased out to fully validate, I reckon I'll be stuck with it.

[smallbeer]

Quality Assurance - although the site may render fine today even though it doesn't validate, unless you validate against the spec, there's no way of knowing that it will render fine tomorrow.

Accessibility (to a point) - web browsers do a good job of rendering pages even though there are errors in the code. Some other devices may not.

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq#whycare

Why should I care if my document is in correct HTML? It displays all right on my browser.

All browsers know how to deal with correct HTML. However, if it is incorrect, the browser has to repair the document, and since not all browsers repair documents in the same way, this introduces differences, so that your document may look and work differently on different browsers. Since there are hundreds of different browsers, and more coming all the time (not only on PCs, but also on PDAs, mobile phones, televisions, printers, even refrigerators), it is impossible to test your document on every browser. If you use incorrect HTML and your document doesn't work on a particular browser, it is your fault; if you use correct HTML and it doesn't work, it is a bug in the browser.