Give a hoot, don't pollute

I'd like to rant just a little for a moment about the overwhelming abundance of really crappy HTML. I recently validated my blogs for 4.01 strict HTML so that, theoretically, anyone with a browser from circa 1997 through the present should be able to view the pages as intended. Out of curiosity I attempted to validate about 100 or so random other blogs and only one came back valid, Textism.

Now, I loathe writing HTML nearly to the point of preferring a dental appointment but is it really that hard to write even remotely valid HTML? Not a single blogging tool seems to generate valid HTML though MT is closer than most. One rather popular blog spewed over 300 errors on the front page alone and I'm amazed that browsers are so amazingly forgiving and seem to encourage such lax practises.

Even Google gives people who sign up for their 'site search' feature a lump of completely invalid HTML to insert into their web pages. It's 15 lines! Couldn't they be bothered to make sure it was valid in some version of HTML? Their front page is riddled with errors after forcing the doc type, since the page doesn't declare it as it should, in HTML 2, 3.2, 4.01 and XHTML 1.0. It's a simple little web page with a text box and a few buttons and they couldn't be bothered to validate it after 5 years?! No wonder 'web designers' are making minimum wage down at Taco Bell.

So I would encourage the people who think that blogging is a 'revolution' to do something really revolutionary...VALIDATE YOUR HTML!