web standards with v8

[RuralWeb]

As an example if you check ebay it fails validation with 190 errors on its home page! a V8 page I checked had 9 errors.

[Bob Isaac]

There is also a theory that Google likes sites that meet W3C guidelines so the better a page validates the higher it will rank.

Not from what I read on various blogs. There is total inconsistency with Google. Big sites, such as eBay, get away with all sorts of errors, but yours and mine will not. On Volvo's corporate press site they never close tags such as <li> and yet they are ranked well.

Google has lost a lot of support, but they are still making a fortune. The yarn about King Canute comes to mind.

Bob

[RuralWeb]

Big sites, such as eBay, get away with all sorts of errors

They do BUT they will always rank higher because of thier massive link popularity when compared to sites like ours. What I am saying is if you take two comparable sites then Google will tend to rank the compliant site higher. You will always find it very hard to rank higher than the likes of ebay because of thier massive internet advertising budget, which is getting bigger.

Small sites need to take advantage of every possible technique that may help in the SEO battle.

[jont]

thier massive internet advertising budget, which is getting bigger.

... and foot print and new content additions....

As Malcolm says - with a comparable site the compliant code will fare better - you don't want to give the spiders any excuse not to trawl through your site and broken code is going to be a sticking point.

Alot of the v7 sites that validate badly are often (not always) down to site owner errors in hacking the templates or entering badly formed HTML between !!< .. >!! tags.

If anyone is very concerned about compliance they will take the time to manually edit as much of the code as possible to reduce the errors to the absolute minimum ... just as if you were creating your own XHTML site you would start with a blank page in Notepad or Dreamweaver and not necessarily from an inbuilt template.

How far you go depends on how close to the standards you really need to get - weighed against the time it takes to implement v the time you could be spending improving site content, design etc. I started a thread about the header tags in the Exec theme which whilst passing validation are incorrectly marked up in terms of nesting - not a massive issue but 1 that is technically incorrect if taking everything to the n'th degree as someone with a screen reader will receive incorrect emphasis on different parts of the page.

On the whole v8 is great straight from the box (some themes more so than others)

[granthams]

I have tried for years to get our Actinic sites 100% compliant but as Chris said earlier, you will never get it 100% with an Actinic store.

I try and take the common sense approach to the design of our sites as I find the some of the guidelines to be unreachable in the real world.

I feel that designing a site for people with disabilities etc. isn't always just achieved by simply following W3C guidelines.

[PaulGrimshaw]

Out of interest, I got it down to a couple of errors with v7 (will try again now with v8).

As its down to just the actinic tags, which I understand is used by the perl scripts, could actinic not just put them in some pseudo comment tag which obviously is only for actinic use, like.

<!--ACTINIC <Actinic:BASEHREF value="http://www.anything-goes.co.uk/" FORCED=1 /> ACTINIC-->

etc etc, so that its hidden from view for the validators etc, but perl would still be able to locate that easily (of course, the compact html option would need to 'skip' these comments, but we could do with that ability for some other comments anyhow)..

just an idea? or am I off base completely?

Paul.

[pinbrook]

just an idea? or am I off base completely?

i don't know but I'd like to see how you progress. I shall be attempting to get the themes I am developing down to the minimum of validation errors, but I haven't finished the designs yet.

[RuralWeb]

Are you checking for accessibility standards as well?

[cbarling]

We have looked at the possibility of changing the Actinic tags so they are comments and therefore pass W3C validation. Given that they have no impact at all in browsers it's pretty irritating that they fail.

It would mean changing the renderering engine to produce the tags as comments (and not suppressing the comments when compact HTML is turned on), plus changing the Perl scripts to recognise the changed tags. We haven't done it yet as it would have introduced further risk into v8.

It's on the list for future consideration but no decision has been made as yet.

Outside of this, our aim has been to make v8 100% W3C compliant - but see Chris Dicken's comments earlier.

Chris